These photos were taken in an area of parkland just out of Melbourne. The city centre is about four and a half miles away as the crow flies.
Ready to launch from one of the canoe ramps dotted along the river.
In the upper centre of this photo you can just see, suspended in the trees, some of the thousands of native Fruit Bats that have formed a colony along a 500 metre section of the river.
A few years ago they began settling in the nearby Royal Botanic Gardens, causing devastating damage to the magnificent collection of exotic trees. The staff at the gardens began a campaign of scaring them away at dawn when they would settle in to roost for the day. The very “high tech” method was to walk around the gardens banging metal trash can lids with lumps of wood, making such a noise that the bats moved on.
I work at another historical garden in the same area and some of the bats headed there instead so we had to begin the same process.
Over the next few weeks, if you took an early morning walk in any of the major parks and gardens in and around Melbourne, you would see gardens staff charging around banging anything that made sufficient noise to scare the bats away…….quite a bizarre situation.
Eventually the bats were “trained” to set up their colonies in a couple of designated areas, this being one of them.
I only wish we could shoot them.
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