FLYING FOXES IN MY BELFRY

I rang a man about my problem. ‘I have bats in my trees’, I stated. I could almost hear him substituting ‘belfry’ for ‘trees’.

‘Not bats’, he said. ‘Flying foxes’.

Well, maybe. I live in Queensland and the things in my tree apparently are flying foxes. Because of the drought they are short of food, and are flying far and wide in search of something to eat. Now, I don’t know what it is that they are eating around here, but I do know that they must have found something, because they are spreading their droppings far and wide – on the walls of our house, on the windows, on the paving, on our car, and I should imagine, on the roof, from whence runs the very rare rain water to go into our tank for us to drink. Yuk!

These flying foxes smell. They smell awfully. The man I spoke to said that they are a very important part of our ecology – yes, I know, they pollinate things and so on – I just want them to go and do their ecological duties somewhere else.

He asked me what sort of trees they were in – pepperinas, I answered. ‘Oh, you should cut those down – they’re not natives’, he blithely replied. Now, for a start, the trees are not strictly speaking mine – they belong to our neighbour, but are close to our back fence, and so for many, many years have provided a very nice backdrop to our garden. I have often said ‘If those trees go, so do I’, so I don’t really think he knows what a drastic step he was suggesting.

It beats me how those creatures get any sleep though. Its winter and we’ve have winter winds. Some days the tops of those trees sway and wave in the winter winds like the crows nest on a sailing ship at sea in a very, very bad storm. Its enough to make you slightly queasy if you watch for long enough. And those little critters hang upside down by their toes, waving wildly back and forth and soundly sleep!

Another good suggestion by the same helpful gentleman was to put tinsel in the trees, as apparently flying foxes don’t like bright light. Now who, I ask you, is going to climb a neighbour’s brittle old pepperina and hang tinsel in the wind blown branches, and then when the flying foxes are hopefully gone, who is going to climb up again to un-decorate the trees!

I thought a bright light might be the answer, so I flashed a mirror at them. I hope someone reading this doesn’t report me and I go to jail for that! The jolly flying foxes seem to have more rights that I do. I’m not allowed to make a loud noise to frighten them either, but when I found myself with two metal objects in my hand and I accidentally banged them together, accidentally four or five times, the flying foxes just made a lazy circle in the sky and re-landed, folded up their wings, and went back to sleep. The bright light had no effect either – they just opened their eyes, looked at me, and closed their eyes and went back to sleep again.

‘How many have you got?’ he asked. I think he thought I was the panicky sort of person who would then say ‘Oh, one or two, at least’. No, I gave him a bit of a shock and said thirty to forty. I gave myself a bit of a shock when I first discovered them too, I can tell you.

I was checking the branches of our jacaranda tree to see if the rosellas, lorikeets and parrots had eaten the seed bell I put in the tree for them, when something scrabbled up the branch as fast as it could go. ‘A bat, a bat’, I screamed, and after I had settled down a bit, I got my camera and took a photo of them. At that stage I was pretty perturbed because there were all of six or eight of them. The word has obviously got out because a whole lot more have since moved in.

The novelty of having flying foxes has long worn off now. I wouldn’t mind so much if they didn’t smell so much, if they didn’t drop their droppings all over all my things, and if they showed any signs of moving on. Native animals are great – we’ve had a selection in our yard over the years. Echidnas, tortoises, blue tongues, one snake, and a kangaroo. We have had every sort of bird too – including a family of owls who sat sleepily in the tree all day long, and flew away at night. A bit like the bats. But the owls didn’t outstay their welcome. A few days and they were gone.

The colony – for that’s what I call it when telling everyone about my problem – seems to have no intention of moving on.

I even stood under the trees the other day, skipping agilely out of the way of as droppings landed, and spoke to them nicely. ‘Please’, I said in a very reasonable tone of voice, ‘Please, can you go somewhere else? I don’t want you here.’

So yes, when you start to talk to animals like that, you probably can be described as having something in your belfry.

And anyway, I Googled them –flying foxes are a species of bat. So there!
© Nelma Ward