White Beech: The Rainforest Years (54 page)

Australian flying foxes are not vampire bats. The commonest of them is or was the Grey-headed Flying Fox,
Pteropus poliocephalus
. The name is more than slightly perverse, because the most obvious attribute of this creature is not its greyish head but its bolero of vivid russet fur. As Joseph Bancroft told the Queensland Philosophical Society on 25 April 1872, ‘The natural food of the animal consists of the native fig and other small fruits found in the scrubs’ (
BC
, 14 May). The bats were of course the original inhabitants of the land that was taken up for vineyards and orchards. Most of their forest habitat was demolished in a single generation, and the bats driven further into the inland, away from areas of high rainfall. There was no way they could survive except by returning at night to plunder orchards and gardens.

Grey-headed Flying Foxes are remarkable animals; the span of their wings, as thin and stretchy as cured tobacco leaf, is more than a metre and a half. Because the stigmas of many rainforest trees are only receptive at night, bats are the most important pollinators for at least sixty tree species. And because flying foxes travel up to fifty kilometres to find their preferred food, they are also the most important seed dispersers. They prefer to roost in tall trees on mountain streamsides 200 metres or so above sea level. On most nights they will be feeding somewhere in the forest at Cave Creek. As they hustle among the leaves, you can hear their soft chuckling and chiding. More than twenty different calls have been identified. Carers for baby flying foxes say that they are intelligent and responsive. Not that that would do them much good. Rats are intelligent and responsive too and we still consider ourselves entitled to persecute and torture them in their millions.

The early settlers knew next to nothing about their ‘nightly visitors of disagreeable and injurious character’ (
SMH
, 22 February 1848), whose ‘voracious powers ha[d] increased tenfold over the destruction of former years’ (
SMH
, 29 January 1848). They didn’t know where they came from or where they went when they had finished gorging. Eventually they learnt that the bats roosted in distant camps in the scrub where by daylight they could be shot in their hundreds from point-blank range. Regular flying-fox shoots or ‘battues’ were organised. Parties of forty or fifty shooters travelled far into the ranges seeking out flying-fox camps. When they found trees full of sleeping bats they simply blasted them with shotguns. A few wet blankets complained that this was not sport but butchery, but they were not allowed to spoil the fun. This enthusiastic account of ‘Flying Fox hunting in the Blue Mountains’ appeared in
the
Sydney Morning Herald
for 26 April 1860:

What a sight! literally thousands of these great bats on the wing, gyrating round high tree tops, ever and anon settling and suspending themselves by their hind feet. Then fired among and rising into the air in the utmost state of consternation yet not forsaking the accustomed roosts. The chirping, clucking and buffetting of the whole; the cries of the wounded, the report of firearms, and shouts of the men in that dense copsewood combined to make a scene rarely equalled for wildness and interest.

A correspondent wrote to the editor of the
Brisbane Courier
on 15 April 1872:

We have found out the haunts of those pests of flying foxes where they during the daytime are congregated together by many hundreds if not thousands.

About a mile or two from the German Station is a country called the Serpentine. A certain portion of this is called the Never country; here they have their home in the daytime, and as soon as the evening comes you can see them come in droves from that direction, spreading all over the district and plundering wherever they find fruit.

Let the young men from town and country fix a day for the sport . . . and come together at the German Station.

The hunters met at the German Station, which was the name commonly given to the site of the abandoned Moravian Mission of Zion’s Hill (now Nundah), at 9 a.m. on the Queen’s Birthday and a great time was had by all but the flying foxes. Such battues became regular occasions.

Agitation for a Flying Fox Extermination Bill began even before the Marsupial Destruction Act came into force. Farmers who organised flying-fox shoots complained of the cost of the ammunition and the difficulty of disposing of ‘dray-loads’ of dead bats. Others had been poisoning fruit with strychnine. Though the agitation intensified the government declined to include flying foxes in any of the revisions of the Marsupial Destruction Act, apparently because the damage done by them to the fruit crop did not affect exports and had no obvious economic consequences. The complaints of the fruitgrowers about the costs of ammunition for the battues and bounties for bat carcasses grew ever louder, and still the government failed to act (
BC
, 22 December 1874).

On 22 October 1880, the Queensland Legislative Assembly went into committee to consider amendments to the Marsupial Destruction Bill.

Mr [Albert] Norton [member for Port Curtis] proposed an amendment having the effect of including ‘all marsupials’ in the operation of the bill, but subsequently withdrew the amendment it being pointed out that flying foxes could be shot in such numbers in certain localities that all the funds available under the measure would soon be exhausted . . . (
BC
, 23 October)

Nobody seemed aware that flying foxes are not marsupials. (Foraging mothers carry their small young attached to a nipple close to the wing.) George King MLA, who had sold in Japan the skins of 40,000 wallabies killed on his property at Gowrie when it was invaded by marsupials during the drought of 1877–8, moved a similar amendment, and called for a division, but there was only one other member in favour, and the motion failed. By 1884, state legislators had learned more about flying foxes. In the Legislative Council, on 29 July 1884, ‘Mr. May pointed out that the bill under discussion was for the destruction of marsupials and he thought flying foxes did not belong to that order.’ The honourable gentlemen made a joke of the matter. ‘Mr. [Peter] Macpherson stated that as attorneys were made gentlemen by Act of Parliament, no doubt flying foxes could be converted into marsupials by the same means.’

When John F. Buckland MLA for Bulimba addressed voters at Holmview on 3 June 1886, the chairman of the meeting drew his attention ‘to the fact that the farmers down in the Beenleigh district were taxed for the purpose of paying for the destruction of the marsupials for the benefit of the squatter’s pocket, while they the farmers were troubled with the flying-fox pest, and he considered this vermin should have been introduced among the things for the destruction of which the government was prepared to pay’ (
BC
, 5 June). Buckland had no option but to agree. The result was the empowering of the local divisional boards to raise finance for the organisation of flying-fox extermination programmes, which was in effect simply passing the buck. It was not until May 1889 that a specially convened Conference of Local Authorities in south-east Queensland passed a motion ‘That the Government be requested to introduce into parliament a measure to provide for the destruction of flying foxes and noxious birds, and give power to a united local authority for the purpose’. The result was the East Moreton Flying Fox Board, which proved just as ineffectual as its antecedents.

Other remedies were tried. To those who observed the Aboriginal method of smoking flying foxes out of their roosts it was clear that ‘the fumes of sulphur, burnt under the trees where the flying foxes camp, will bring them down wholesale . . . as the creatures hang in large masses like bunches of grapes, sulphur on a moderately calm day could be used effectively on them.’ Orchardists tried ringing bells, leaving lamps lit all night, using various substances said to be bat-repellent, and running wires around the trees. Nothing worked. Many fruitgrowers gave up, leaving their orchards to go feral. Others invested in costly netting and went broke. Twenty years ago electric grids were introduced. These are ranks of live wires inches apart that will electrocute any bat that comes in contact; in 2001 use of these was banned, but as the ban is barely policed and the farmers were not required actually to dismantle the grids, it is thought to be widely flouted.

Grey-headed Flying Fox numbers are now in serious decline, nobody quite knows why. It has been suggested that the fall in numbers and a demonstrable shift of 300 kilometres southwards in their range are responses to climate change. Nearly 50,000 have been discovered dead on their roosts after periods when daytime temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius. In November 2008 at nearby Canungra Bat Camp 300 baby bats were found abandoned. They were rescued and rehabilitated by a new generation of bat-carers. Roost sites are now legally protected; a recent biodiversity action plan developed for the Border Ranges suggests that a buffer zone of 200 metres must be left around any bat camp, particularly those where females gather to give birth. Meanwhile thousands of bats are injured every year by barbed wire; others become trapped in fruit-tree netting and still more are electrocuted. Even in the inner city you can see flying foxes hanging dead from power lines.

In February 2010 ‘an estimated 40,000 flying foxes descend[ed] on Canungra’. A local ‘Vietnam veteran and retiree’ complained that the bats had made him and his wife sick, that they carried
E. coli
and Giardia in their droppings. He demanded a cull. ‘The only method I know of that is 100 per cent foolproof is to blow the damn things out of the sky,’ he told reporters, blissfully unaware of the lesson of history.

The case against fruit bats has been recently strengthened by the identification of three bat-borne diseases: Hendra Virus, Australian Bat Lyssa Virus and Menangle Virus.

Hendra Virus (HeV) was the first to turn up, in 1994 in the Brisbane suburb of Hendra, where it killed fourteen horses. A trainer and a stable-hand caring for the affected horses also contracted the disease and the trainer died. Black and Spectacled Flying Foxes have antibodies to the disease and are assumed to be the vectors but, though many tests have been done, the way the disease is transferred is still not understood (
Australian Veterinary Journal
, 76:12). The hosts for HeV are now understood to include pet animals, mice, brush-tailed possums, bandicoots, hares, carpet pythons and a variety of blood-sucking insects including March flies. Horses continue to become infected and there is still no treatment. More than forty horses have died, seven people have contracted the disease through contact with infected horses, and four of them have died. In October 2006 a horse died of Hendra disease just over the range near Murwillumbah.

In November 1996 an animal carer was handling a Yellow-bellied Sheath-tail Bat when she received a scratch; four to five weeks later she began to show signs of a rabies-like illness, and twenty days later she died. Another woman who had been bitten by a flying fox which she was trying to detach from a terrified child four months earlier and had suffered no apparent ill effect refused post-exposure treatment only to fall ill two years on. She was admitted to hospital but died nineteen days later. In this case the virus was a lyssavirus (ABLV), from the same family as rabies.

Flying foxes are thought to be the vectors of the third bat-borne virus, which was first detected in 1997 when animals in a piggery at Menangle became ill and two of the humans looking after them came down with something like flu. Research into the bat-borne viruses goes on, but so far neither state nor federal government has voted to fund the development of a vaccine.

Perhaps the slaughter of the 1880s and 90s did have long-term consequences, for flying foxes breed slowly, with only one offspring per female per year. Their range seems to be sliding southwards, and the cause seems to be global warming. In 1999 the Grey-headed Flying Fox was declared ‘vulnerable to extinction’. It is now protected everywhere in Australia. Even in Queensland roost sites are supposed to have been protected since 1994. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that shooting flying foxes is known to be inhumane, in 2012 the Queensland government announced its intention to issue permits to farmers allowing them to shoot specific numbers of four species of flying foxes if other control methods had been tried and failed. The reasons given were inconsistent; some said it was to assist beleaguered Queensland fruit farmers, others that it was to limit the spread of Hendra virus, others that bats are a nuisance. The announcement was made on Threatened Species Day.

In 2010 CCRRS discovered its own flying-fox camp. Flying foxes need dense riparian vegetation, which is what we’ve got. They like altitude, ditto. And they like fruit, ditto again. In March 2010 the workforce became aware of an unusual level of noise emanating from the creekside. As they walked through the bush towards the noise they became aware of an equally unusual level of smell. On the boundary with the national park they found a 50-square-metre bat camp. The tall roost trees were almost completely defoliated and underneath them, the little walking-stick palms, exposed as they were both to the white-hot sun and a rain of bat excrement, were dying. The workforce reckoned that there were 1,000 to 1,500 Grey-headed Flying Foxes in the camp. There was nothing they could do to save the little trees, not even flap their arms and say ‘shoo!’ It is now illegal to disturb any bat roost. The Gold Coast City Council solemnly intones that ‘Camp locations should be excluded from public access. A buffer zone of 200m is recommended.’ Our bat camp was within twenty metres of the walkway down which the 300,000 people who visit the Natural Bridge Section of the Springbrook National Park each year are required to walk. There was not so much as a sign to warn them to keep away from the bat camp. At the end of August the bats were gone, as suddenly as they came.