Help Baby Bats Take Flight!

Hello Bat Friends!

Sydney Wildlife bat carers are bracing themselves, we have about 4-6 weeks before babies will start being born and adult female flying foxes are already coming into care pregnant. We, of course, always hope that no babies will be orphaned, but each year has been seeing steadily more individuals come into care so we are determined to be prepared for the worst. We have several new carers about to be trained up in a week and a half, which is important to share the amazing responsibility of raising babies to be releaseable.

Kukundi has been surprisingly busy over winter as we dont just have baby visitors, but also provide high-class hospitality for adults that find themselves down on their luck. Unfortunately, with ever-growing issues such as human enroachment on flying fox habitat and deforestation, flying foxes do tend to get in trouble more frequently each year. Our bat slaves have been dutifully cleaning the facility and feeding the guests each day, and we're confident now that Spring has almost sprung that these adults will be able to assimilate perfectly back into the wild where they belong, with full bellies and even fuller strength!

Sometimes we have adults that cant be released back into the wild for a variety of reasons. These might include wing damage bad enough that they cant fly long distances, and thus wouldnt survive out there for long. Some of these glorious souls are able to be kept for educational purposes, a very important job to teach those that might not yet understand how amazing these animals are. I was lucky enough to visit some of these incredibly beautiful animals yesterday at the Australian Walkabout Wildlife Park in Calga, on the coast just up from Sydney. If you're ever in the area, you should go and visit them too! http://www.walkaboutpark.com.au/

One of the bat slaves Sarah and I have recently come back from Buton Island, where we were contracted as Volunteer Bat Scientists for a biodiversity conservation group, Operation Wallacea. This NGO has been running for decades now and the project in Indonesia is working towards conserving as much natural rainforest as possible. This is achieved by taking inventory of the island's biodiversity and amassing a huge data set that contributes to an application for REDD+, which will hopefully result in a grant for the organisation to continue surveying and protecting the forest. More information about the organisation can be found here: http://opwall.com/about-us/what-is-opwall/

Sarah and I were on different teams, but spent 4-5 weeks surveying bats on the island, whilst teaching and mentoring volunteer students on surveying methods and identification skills. It was an amazing experience and very rewarding to contribute to on-the-ground conservation work, especially in a beautiful tropical rainforest setting! It was also incredibly exciting to meet all sorts of new and different bats, I will attach one of my little Cyanopterus fruit bat photos below.

As usual, thank you so much to all our amazing supporters! Without your generous donations, we would not be able to continue to serve and help our amazing flying foxes get themselves strong enough to get back into the wild and continue their selfless natural pollinating services! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

Georgina the Bat Slave

Hello Bat Friends!

Only a short report this time; after our nightmare Summer, our Autumn season proved more than trying! Hundreds of net-court flying foxes were reported in needing help in Sydney alone- the rest of the east coast of Australia felt the same influxes.

We've had a group of over 20 female grey-headed flying foxes waiting patiently in our large flight rehab cage at Kukundi for the past month or more to get a look into the release cage- but they're being selfishly held back by the males that we put into the cage in April who refuse to leave! We cannot ethically put the females in the cage to be harrassed by the nuisance boys whilst they're trying to recover and ready themselves for the big wild world. We have no idea why the boys wont leave! So naughty and quite unusual.

Kukundi received its new hot water system!! It sounds not exciting, but it really is! We are able to properly clean everything now, and I'm sure the bats are grateful for it. We also received a great gift of an automatic fruit cutter which produces perfect little cubes for the bats to chew on; it has helped the volunteers at Kukundi save a huge amount of time from cutting it all up by hand.

This humble bat slave has been contracted by a biodiversity institute called Operation Wallacea to go and survey bats on the Indonesian island of Buton, with one of our other amazing bat slaves Sarah, and we'll be gone for a month or so. Will hopefully have some excellent photos of strange new bats to share with you all next report, but in the meantime, heres some of our local little grey's currently in care..

Thanks again to all of our wonderful supporters, your contibutions to our cause are making a massive difference!