By Maryanne Large | Sydney Wildlife volunteer
Great news! The new cage is now finished, certified and in use!
It's been a lot of work, and we still need to finish paying for it, but the great thing is that our baby bats now have a new creche to learn to fly and a bit of bat ettiquette before heading off out into the world. The new cage is lovely and has some very important features. It is double lined, to protect the babies from both predators and over curious primates, it has an "airlock" so we can enter and leave without risking bats flying out, and it's "dressed" with lots of things to hang on, cloths to provide cover to be hide, lots of fresh folliage and of course dinner laid on each night.
As usual at this time of year, we've been doing a lot of cleaning, chopping and home delivery for our bats. The nightly chop is about 30kgs, which is a LOT.There's also a lot of cleaning. "What goes up", and all that... BTW did you know that bats (like most flying animals) have super fast metabolisms so they don't need to carry extra weight? The "food to floor" time is only about 20 minutes. They hang upside down/the right way up from their thumbs to poo? that way they don't get covered. But new carers feeding babies often do (the impulse to put the head on top is strong). All part of the learning process :-)
Anyway, fortunately we have quite a well organised schedule of people to clean, chop and hand out the buckets of fruit. The bats are as grateful and appreciative as teenagers, which is just as well, as they are being "dehumanised" in preparation for life in the wild. Hmmm..
This year we have 2 lots of youngsters: the local grey headed flying foxes and the black flying foxes that we took in from the north earlier in the season due to a heat stress event. The blacks will need to be released into their own colony, so they will have to be transfrered up north pretty soon.
In the next couple of reports we'll explain how the bats go from cage to the wild.
Thanks so much for being involved, and for all your support.
By Maryanne Large | Sydney Wildlife volunteer
By Maryanne Large | Sydney Wildlife volunteer
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