Big Bats

Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens is a great place to spend a few hours on a beautiful spring day. It's free and it's full of bats. They're large fruit bats called Grey Headed Flying Foxes and they're supposed to sleep during the day, but when we went by on Tuesday they couldn't sit still. I count sixteen flapping around in this picture with Sydney Tower in the background, and a few more hanging in the trees, but there are literally hundreds of them living in a relatively small area of the gardens. A few trees have been destroyed by the bats living in them and the paths around the area where they hang are covered in guano. There's a plaque supposedly describing the bats and their behavior but it's totally illegible because it's coated in their droppings.

I took about a hundred pictures of bats in flight and I'm still trying to sort through them. This one seemed decent and I like it because you can see his mammal parts clearly. You can see his furry little face, mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. You can see his feet and the way his hands are stretched out and webbed to make wings.

Since it's spring, we even saw some mother bats with little babies clinging to them. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of them, but if I lived here in Sydney, I'd go back to the botanic gardens every clear day until I did.