The time the Flying Foxes settled in Katherine

We had just had the 1998 Katherine Flood a few years before and poor Katherine South was invaded by Fruit bats.

Nearly every tree in every yard was a teeming mass of screeching flying foxes.....not to mention the odour.

It is a bit hard to swallow that Katherine has an event called the "Flying Fox Festival". But when the furry creatures move in to live in town with us we drive them off.

 

We used to have a fruit bat for a few years that had a busted wing and individually it had the ability to smell really batty, so just imagine tens of thousands ripping to shreds and defoliating every tree in your yard, noisy fighting all night & all day while you are trying to sleep.

Your vehicle covered in acidic bat doo, your washing bombarded......it wasn't pretty at all.

They only had to move back over the end of the street and down into the riverbank to make the residents happy, but it wasn't going to happen without a bit of encouragement.

 

Fight Fire with Fire

Because the bats kept everyone up all night, the authorities kept the bats up all day for several days in a row. There were bird shot blasts, horns, sirens, fence banging, water spray, chainsawing your trees down and any other way you could think of to make life miserable or uninviting for the unwelcome guests.
 

I had been on the internet to all bat eradication services in the USA asking for a solution and the best they came up with was......."let us know how you go as we usually only deal with a few bats in peoples roof crawlspace"

The noise went on so several days and within a few days the colony had regrouped in the riverbank and Katherine South returned to normal.

They have been missing from the Low Level Nature Park in their masses over the last few years.

And even in Feb/March 2003 a few bats were trying to mass back in Katherine South, so the local council has been out with bird shot & other deterrents to push the bats back into the river corridor a hundred metres away.

But they are still around again in 2004, mainly in the riverbank, but trying to take over the Katherine South area once again.

Had to have a laugh in Feb 2005 when the bats were hanging around in Katherine East. A "Bat Patrol" was going about making a bit of noise in the streets where bats were trying to settle at about 10AM in the morning. A local no-hoper who resides in Fomin Place & keeps the neighbors awake to all hours with loud music was heard screaming out at the bat patrol "Don't you know people are trying to sleep" (OK I worded it politely). Several residents in the area were most pleased for a change, they finally got him back.