Here in Forbes (central NSW, not really in
COG territory at all) I regularly see one or two fruit bats each night over
summer, presumably little red flying foxes. However, last night I was
astonished to see hundreds and hundreds… and hundreds, flying past at
maybe 100m above ground level, heading northwest. I only had a part-sky
view from my verandah and only started taking notice after they had been going
for a while, but estimated that I watched 6,000 fly past in a fifteen minute
period in the last light of dusk. I saw a few tonight doing a similar
thing, but maybe only a couple of hundred in total. Do these critters
make mass migrations?
Cheers
John Rawsthorne
From: Leo Berzins
[
Sent: Friday, 1 February 2008
10:19 PM
To:
Subject: [canberrabirds] Bats
Shortly before nine o'clock this evening (Friday), my
partner Robyn and I were sitting on the north facing verandah of our
humble shack in west Queanbeyan enjoying a quiet glass of wine or two
(Pewsey Vale riesling and O'Leary Walker shiraz, if you must know) when
our attention was drawn skyward by the appearance of some large,
silent ariborne creatures flying less than fifty metres above us in a
south-easterly direction. They weren't in a close flock, but over the course of
the next five minutes or so, we would have seen at least thirty fly over
our airspace. Locking onto one of them with my now ever-present
binoculars, I glimpsed the distinctive silhouhette of bat wings. Sizewise, they
looked larger than a currawong and probably closer to a raven (estimation in
poor light).
It seems that is not a one-off sighting, as Robyn saw some
similar airborne creatures at the same time yesterday evening flying in the
same direction.
Our estimation of their flight path is that they were coming
from the general direction fo Mount
Ainslie.
Where were they heading? What species of bat were they? Are
they temporarily locally resident like the Grey-headed Flying-foxes a couple of
years ago at Regatta Point?
