Wednesday 6 June 2012

Rebekah & I went to a bat seminar tonight. The Brisbane City Council was offering a free talk about bats. It was on the north side, which is a bit of a hike, but we'd made a commitment to go, so go we did.
I'm glad we did. The talk, by Bat Conservation and Rescue Qld, was mainly about flying foxes and very interesting. I was horrified to hear a couple of days (weeks?) ago that the new state government plans to reintroduce culling of flying foxes. Yes, sometimes they're smelly; sometimes they're noisy; but they're also really quite very cute. And apparently, very intelligent (which doesn't surprise me).
Also learnt that our cocos palm is bad news for flying foxes. Bats can get tangled in their leaves, caught on the spikes and flower cases, get ulcers from eating the green fruit, get the seed pods stuck in their jaws, and ruin their teeth on the seed pods. And here we were thinking we doing them a favour having them in our yard. Seems we'll be getting rid of the palms (as soon as I can convince the Man).