The Spliced City

On my last day in Sydney, I wanted to go see some of the places I had not managed to see thus far. That included a visit to Lachlan Swamp in Centennial Park which is home to the city’s largest bat colony. The official Parklands website has assembled a list of fun facts about them and also provides some learning resources. Did you know bats are the world’s only flying mammals – and that they give birth to live young upside down!?! They are also important pollinators and seed dispersers as they fly up to 300km or more a night 300 km a night following their noses to the fruit which they suck.

We ended up renting Lime e-bikes near Bondi station and zipped over to the park in no time. The place is very easy to find by simply typing in the name of the swamp in Google Maps. Our timing was not quite right in the sense that the bats are most active right around dusk when they get ready to head out to find food for the night. So they were not flying right over my head — but I still got a pretty good sense of their numbers – and the 1-min video I recorded is already plenty noisy despite the fact that most of them were still sleepy and lazy.

Another interesting fact is that the colony in Centennial Park is actually a band of refugees. Back in 2013, the bats were being driven out from the Royal Botanic Gardens near the famous Opera House because they were damaging heritage trees. Their dispersal was achieved by playing loud recorded industrial noise. Wildlife activists were please to find that rather than drive the newcomers out, Centennial Park welcomed them and even built a special little viewing area so that curious humans might better admire the nightly spectacle.

Here is the link to the 1-min listening video I recorded:

The Australian Government has a really cool interactive Flying Fox Monitoring Site but observations seem to end in 2022. See: http://www.environment.gov.au/webgis-framework/apps/ffc-wide/ffc-wide.jsf.