Help Baby Bats Take Flight!

What a bat season this has been! The horrendous bushfires which wiped out critical food habitat and led to a mass abandonment of pups due to starving mothers; then the mass mortalities from extreme heat, and then torrential rain and flooding with trees collapsing and power lines down, bats getting entangled in fruit netting - it has been really, really busy with bat rescues. 

We opened Kukundi crèche for our flying-fox pups early January 2020 and have had over 170 pups go through the release program. That is a lot of weekly weigh and measure that have been undertaken! It is also a huge amount of fruit that had been cut daily to feed the hungry pups. Thankfully we have had wonderful support from one of our major supermarket chains that donated fruit for a large part of the season and our cool room has been up and running. This has meant we have been able to store fruit and minimise loss due to spoilage – something that we really needed this season with so many mouths to feed.

This year we also took in pups from other areas. One particular group of pups came from down south of Sydney. Earlier in the year (February) they had a severe hailstorm that resulted in many pups coming into their care at that time. Due to the devastating bushfire we had at the beginning of this year and the subsequent destruction of native forests and bushland, food for flying-foxes was scarce, so we were asked if we could accommodate these pups into our release program. The last group of these pups were successfully released at the end of May.

We have also had many adults and juveniles come into care this season for a variety of reasons, which have been released from the large flight cage at Kukundi. This is only just now starting to slow down and hopefully sometime in the next few weeks we will close the facility for a much-needed rest for our volunteers. This will also give us time to do maintenance work on the cages and surrounding area. We need to repaint the cage floor surface; replace the netting on the inside of the crèche cage; and look at putting in a concrete path running from the cutting room to the cage doors. This will make transporting of fruit to the cage easier and safer. Manhandling 60 to 90kgs (132 to 198lbs) of fruit is not an easy job, so anything we can to make this daily task less onerous will help our volunteers.

Thank you so much for all your generous donations that enable us to continue to rescue, rehabilitate and release back into the wild our beautiful bats. We could not do it without your help.

Cheers

Fiona Bassett

Project manager