One of the crucial spectacular sights at Adelaide’s Womadelaide music competition just isn’t on the official lineup.
As nightfall approaches, hundreds of grey-headed flying foxes start chattering and stretching their wings as they put together to ascend from their roosts in Botanic Park and set out looking for meals.
“It’s an incredible sight,” says affiliate professor Wayne Boardman, a wildlife veterinarian and flying fox researcher on the College of Adelaide. At first a couple of early birds take to the skies, he says, then increasingly, “diving, swooping, flapping”.
“Because the night time sky darkens, steadily the total camp take to the air – a mass of circling, squawking bats all keen to begin foraging after a day of relaxation.”
For a lot of festivalgoers, the nightly fly-out ritual is their first time seeing the animals, additionally known as megabats, up shut. Boardman runs a “bat tent” close to one of many primary phases, kitted out with shows, movies and binoculars to coach guests and deal with misconceptions in regards to the flying foxes.
“They’re simply astonishing animals,” he says. “The loveliness of flying foxes, their sheer magnificence, astonishing biology, the superb anatomy – it by no means ceases to amaze me.”
But misinformation in regards to the animals is rife, from well-meaning dad and mom telling youngsters they use sound waves to navigate (they don’t), to extra sinister notions together with that the animals are “pests” that “don’t belong right here”.
“They got here of their very own volition,” Boardman says. Gray-headed flying foxes first arrived in Adelaide in 2010, establishing a everlasting camp on First Creek, in parklands simply north of the CBD, the place they’ve elevated in quantity from 1,000 to about 50,000 at present.
Flying foxes are nomadic, able to travelling as much as 50km at night time looking for meals sources akin to flowering gums, figs and fruit bushes.
Tim Pearson, a wildlife ecologist who specialises in flying fox behaviour and communication, says the “double whammy” of destroying native forests whereas offering different meals sources in farms and residential areas creates the potential for human-bat battle and harassment, recognized as a menace in restoration plans for endangered spectacled flying foxes and weak grey-headed flying foxes.
Populations of each species have declined in current a long time, though assessing their present standing has turn out to be more difficult because the nationwide flying fox monitoring program concluded in 2022.
“The Australian angle in direction of wildlife has at all times been optimistic, offering it doesn’t inconvenience you,” Pearson says. Sadly for flying foxes, of their case it usually does.
Issues have been getting higher, Pearson says, however flare-ups nonetheless happen when sensible issues – about noise, the animals’ impression on fruit growers, energy outages or potential illness threats – are reported in breathless phrases by the media.
Efforts to disperse the bats are typically counterproductive and makes an attempt to advertise empathy and coexistence haven’t labored. Scientists now suppose “normalising” flying foxes could be a means ahead, depicting them as a pure a part of Australian wildlife in artwork, pictures, books, neighborhood occasions and schooling. Regardless of their usually seen and audible presence in cities and cities, representations of flying foxes in mainstream media and in style tradition stay scarce and largely unfavourable, in response to the paper printed in Australian Zoologist.
Pearson, a co-author of the paper, works with tame schooling flying foxes at a wildlife park. As soon as folks see these cute, furry animals up shut, they realise they’re “curious, light, clever” with particular person personalities, he says.
Doug Gimesy, a wildlife and conservation photojournalist, says bats – flying foxes and microbats – make up practically 20% of all mammals, however “don’t get 20% of the air time”.
I simply love the aesthetics of them, and that they fly and sleep and do every thing the other way up
Alex Sugar
“As a bunch, they’re usually ignored, under-appreciated and misunderstood,” he says. “At worst they’re vilified and face a continuing battle of disinformation, hate speech and are even persecuted.”
Gimesy started photographing flying foxes in 2016 and has since spent greater than 160 days within the area, taking hundreds of pictures that doc each facet of their lives.
“I turned obsessive about attempting to take the right photograph of them that will present them in all their glory and all their magnificence,” he says.
Via his award-winning pictures and youngsters’s e book, Life Upside Down, Gimesy is hoping to indicate folks how magnificent the animals are, “to get folks to interact and ask questions and perceive”.
Two pictures have been essential to seize and share, he says. In a single, a flying fox pokes its pink tongue right into a eucalyptus blossom – as a result of folks don’t realise what essential pollinators they’re, he says.
Within the different, a pup clings to its mum because it breastfeeds in mid-flight, which often triggers an emotional response. It’s the realisation “they carry their younger in flight, and so they’re flying mammals”.
The paper says shifting attitudes in direction of species akin to sharks and crocodiles, as soon as topic to widespread persecution, provide optimism that contentious points between flying foxes and folks might be managed with out maligning them as a species.
In Fisher reserve, within the interior Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy, youngsters play on the inexperienced grass as an outsized flying fox takes to the air with a magpie, a squirrel glider and pink paper planes towards a purple sky.
The colorful mural, by Alex Sugar, is considered one of a number of depicting flying foxes alongside different Australian wildlife and quirky parts.
Sugar is keen on the bats, and so they turned a recurrent function in his work after their nightly flyout over the Yarra River drew his consideration. “We have to spotlight them extra in on a regular basis tradition and the problems that they’re going by means of as properly with their present habitat,” he says.
As an artist he enjoys capturing their options, their big, glistening eyes and leathery, angular wings.
“I simply love the aesthetics of them, and that they fly and sleep and do every thing the other way up.”
This article by Petra Inventory was first printed by The Guardian on 2 January 2025. Lead Picture: ‘I turned obsessive about attempting to take the right photograph of them’: grey-headed flying foxes on a department over the Yarra River as photographed by Doug Gimesy.
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