Raising our fruit bat babies

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My mother recently told me that the term flying fox is used by those who think of bats as pests, and so I’ve tried to follow her lead and call them fruit bats instead, despite calling them flying foxes for much of my youth.

Every year, colonies of spectacled fruit bats used to nest in trees along the Daintree River and its surrounds (I believe they still do, but I’m not there to witness it anymore). During the day, these trees are covered in sleeping bats, hanging on with their feet. They make the trees look as if they’re covered in thousands of tiny, furled umbrellas. The noise of a colony of bats is immense - a roar of chittering, screeching voices.

Every year, when these colonies nested near our property, we would find abandoned baby fruit bats, due to their mothers being killed, or disorientated due to a farmer’s anti-bat efforts. There are wildlife rescue organisations who arrange for people to foster wild animals who are injured or abandoned when young, and due to my mother’s membership in one of these organisations, we fostered a number of spectacled fruit bats over the years.

Baby fruit bats are extremely cute, as all small mammals are - enormous black eyes set in an enquiring furry little face and clumsy little wings with rather sharp spikes on the end. We fed the babies on a special formula, a process which required wrapping the bat up in a piece of material to keep its wings still, and holding it slanted with its head to the ground before holding the teat of the feeding bottle over its mouth. They gnawed on this with great enthusiasm while they sucked down the formula, and it usually required a bit of gentle encouragement for them to let go of the teat - they were convinced that they would find something more in there if they sucked hard enough. They usually relaxed into sleep once fed, their large eyes slowly closing into contented little slits, before shutting completely.

After the formula, the bats move on to fruit - in the case of Mum’s fostered bats, they had little bowls of fruit salad carefully cut up for them. Overnight, the baby bats slept in a woven basket, hanging down from material attached to its sides. They would start up a great bout of screeching in the morning when it was time for their chopped up mango and banana. Mum would attach them to the sides of her shirt, and they enthusiastically climbed all over her, gnawing on their fruit with needle-like teeth, and getting the hooks on their wings stuck in her shirt and in her skin on various painful places. Once an overly excited bat pierced part of the skin around her eye, which I’m sure was very painful, although I don’t remember her making much of a fuss.

When the bats got older, they began flapping from their perch, growing stronger and stronger until their body hovered out horizontally while they beat their wings vigorously. Eventually, they actually took off, and flew across the room in a great panic wondering what the hell was going on. Sometimes they landed on Mum, scrabbling around in a panic and hiding themselves under the arm of her shirt until they felt calmer.

At that stage of their development, they were moved out of the house into an enclosure outside, where they could practice their flying, devour enormous amounts of fruit, and be as noisy as their hearts desired. Their presence attracted pythons, who would drape themselves longingly over the enclosure, much to the noisy terror of the bats. Mum would dash out to their rescue, whacking the pythons with a broom and warning them sternly to remove themselves at once.

I cannot now remember how many bats we successfully released back into the wild. I remember several distressing deaths that occurred when pythons managed to breach the walls of the enclosures, despite my father and I spending a very sweaty summer day reroofing the shed where several bats were housed. Snakes are so difficult to keep out, squishing their way through the tiniest of cracks and crevices. I haven’t seen a single snake since I moved to Brisbane, but I often hear bats, fighting outside in our palm trees or screeching at each other across our street. I see them to - the occasional single one flying silently through the suburb on my way home from the train, and once I saw a colony, a stream of bats flying through the sky across our backyard at dusk, towards their feeding grounds. Many urban dwellers think of them as pests, but I’m incapable of it - I feel such fondness hearing their voices out in the night, remembering the contented squinched face of the baby bats on my lap after feeding, as they drifted off into sleep.

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