Hanging with flying foxes

Despite their vulnerable status, grey-headed flying-foxes outnumber the 2900 residents of this northern NSW town by as many as 27:1.

At the Belfry, Bellingen’s appropriately named youth hostel, a corridor is lined with photographs of naked backpackers enjoying the NSW north coast – in the rainforest, under waterfalls and on empty beaches. The shot of the feral princess from Melbourne draped in the diaphanous shed skin of a 3 m carpet python is worthy of a fashion magazine, though it looks as if the outfit’s original owner could have swallowed her whole. Fortunately, carpet pythons generally go after smaller stuff: bush rats, the odd possum and flying-foxes.

If you happen to be crossing the Bellinger River at Lavender’s Bridge around dusk you could be forgiven for thinking that this is the flying-fox capital of the universe. The exodus of up to 80,000 of them from Bellingen Island Reserve, upstream from the bridge, is one of the country’s premiere wildlife spectaculars. They’re off for a night’s foraging at feeding grounds up to 30 km away, where eucalypt, paperbark and other native blossoms provide a rocket fuel of raw nectar, which is necessary for long-range flight. As the animals feed, their fur and wings become dusted with pollen grains, which are transferred from tree to tree. The seeds of the rainforest fruits that supplement their diets – including figs, koda berries and brush cherries – are dropped over a wide area.

In this way flying-foxes connect forest remnants across large distances far more effectively than other mammals, or pollinating birds and insects. But as patches of native bush diminish in size and number throughout the animals’ range, their choice of places to feed and camp has been reduced. We know from early settlers’ accounts that they’ve been coming to Bellingen Island for at least 100 years, and Aboriginal tradition refers to their presence much earlier than that. They once had their pick of dozens of sites in this area, and until the 1970s the island was left unoccupied for up to 10 years at a time. Then the animals began using the site constantly. Despite this, the overall population is in decline, falling by as much as one-third since the late 1980s.

A track from the old caravan park descends to the silted-up river bed before climbing to the ‘island’; the Bellinger River abandoned its loop around the rainforest remnant decades ago. There’s a smell – a subtle blend of sweet basil, compost and bat pheromones. If you abandon your prejudices, it’s the kind of animal essence from which, you imagine, some free-thinking perfumer could conjure a beguiling scent. The trees are festooned with thousands of flying-foxes, like a bumper crop of leathery black fruit. A twig breaks under my foot and I’m suddenly in the spotlight of hundreds of pairs of snapping brown eyes. They have sharp, intelligent faces and foxy ears. It’s not hard to see why some scientists have thought they might be classified as primates.

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