The Fruit Bats of Colac

There’s a particular kind of noise that comes from the Colac Botanical Gardens (about 2 hours west of Melbourne in Australia) if you arrive at the right time of day. It's a layered, restless chatter that you might think in the first instance is birds. But if you Follow it to the end of the gardens you’ll find them: hundreds of grey-headed flying foxes draped across the treetops making one hell of a noise.

A sidebar - You might think they are bats and you are right. A grey-headed flying fox is Australia’s largest native fruit eating bat, with grey fur and a rusty-orange collar around its neck. It eats fruit, nectar, and pollen, and unlike many other bats, it mainly uses its eyes and sense of smell rather than echolocation

They hang there with an odd sort of purpose, wrapped in themselves, occasionally jostling for space like commuters on a crowded tram. Every so often one drops, wings snapping open mid-fall, and glides across the gardens with a grace. Hard to catch with a camera but after enough tries I got there. the Sun shining through their wings.

Locals seem divided about them. Some see mess, smell, and noise, so much noise, and so much stripping of the trees. Others see a living, shifting ecosystem right in the middle of town. Stand there long enough and you start to notice the details: the rustle of wings, the soft clicking sounds, the way sunlight filters through a canopy that’s very much alive.

The locals have tried to remove them, scare them of with noises and frequencies and unplesant sounds, but they are leaving, and there is a certain irony to trying to remove a native animal to protect the introduced European trees of the planned garden.

So here I am in the late afternoon as the the colony begins to stir in earnest. One by one, then in loose waves, they lift off toward the horizon, heading out over Colac in search of food. The trees grow quieter, but not empty—just waiting for their return.