The year was 2006 and it was the first Christmas away from our Sydney home in thirty years. The simple reason for this being that we no longer called Sydney home, having made the decision some months earlier to seek out a place with a quieter, more relaxed and less crowded lifestyle. We found our little piece of paradise on the coast about 500 hundred kilometres North of Sydney. It is called Coffs Harbour, named in honour of its founder Captain Korff. Somewhere along the way a spelling error seems to have occurred and was never rectified! Anyway, it is a picturesque place nestled between high mountains with a harbour that has, at its entrance, a small island called Muttonbird Island. During the summer months the island is home to a large number of Muttonbirds, or Short-tailed Shearwaters as they are now called, who migrate here every year from the Northern Hemisphere to breed. They do not build nests in trees like most birds, but dig burrows in the ground like rabbits. Many a tourist has tripped over, or fallen into their holes! It is not, however, tourists disappearing down Muttonbird holes that troubles the residents of this beautiful city. It is something else! The city planners, in their wisdom long ago, decided to leave large tracts of natural bushland within the city. Consequently many homes sit at the edge of a glorious natural rainforest, complete with Wallabies and Koalas. Our new home is one of these, and, yes, the Koalas and Wallabies are there because we actually saw them not long after we moved in. The first warning of what was to come, occurred just a few days before Christmas. Roger wanted to see our neighbour, Peter, who was interested in watching a couple of DVDs of our travels, and as I could hear him apparently hammering on his tin shed roof, I informed Roger who picked up the DVDs and went next door. When he returned a half hour later, I inquired as to what Peter was doing. "He was testing his Bat Box!" he answered. "He was WHAT?" I replied. Now at this point in the narration a bit of background material is essential. As a child growing up in country Queensland we called them Flying Foxes, and they used to come to our house every summer to eat our mangoes. They would also eat any other fruit that was about and were very much cursed by everybody, especially the orchardists. They are nocturnal, and sleep hanging upside down in colonies numbering in the thousands, during the daylight hours. These colonies are noisy, smelly and a health hazard, yet in the madness of to-day’s politically correct world, where a vocal minority is able to govern the majority, they have been declared a protected species and it is now illegal to harm them, or the branches they roost on, in any way. One of the weirdest sights that I have ever seen is the dusk sky filled with these flapping creatures flying silently northward to attack the orchards. Peter has said that the number in flight is over fifty thousand. Now the dilemma facing the Coffs Harbour residents is that there is a very large colony of these dreadful creatures near the city centre in close proximity to their homes. When we arrived the colony was in a forest across the road on the south side, but the residents, fed up with their noise and filthy droppings decided to do something about it. As the Fruit Bats do not like noise they grabbed anything that would make a noise and, all together, went on the attack. The colony then took off and moved to our quieter forest on the north side. The all knowledgeable Peter informed us that a Fruit Bat colony near one's house can cause its property value to drop by as much as eighty thousand dollars. This seems incentive enough to "persuade" a Fruit Bat colony to move on despite what the law says! Dismayed at their new neighbours, the residents around the north side forest launched their attack late in the afternoon on Christmas Day. Perhaps being primed with more than a little bit of alcohol and an urge to work off all those extra calories did it, but suddenly the air was filled with extraordinary loud bangs, clashings of metal on metal and sounds like fire crackers exploding. There was even the occasional whoosh and bang of skyrockets. Obviously the Christmas message of "Peace on Earth, and Goodwill to all Men" does not extend to Fruit Bats! The enormous racket just went on and on, and soon the sky above was filled with hundreds of dark flapping shapes shrieking in indignation. Some alighted in trees near our houses and Peter raced out with his freshly tuned bat box and began beating it wildly. Thankfully they moved on after a while. Meanwhile, the rest of the traumatised flock just circled the area, uncertain what to do. The battle went on periodically for the next couple of hours, until dusk, when the main body, numbering in their thousands, arrived flying northwards, and the displaced flock flapped away to join them. The next day I walked down to the site of the battle to see how effective the Christmas Day attack was. There were still a few Fruit Bats hanging in the trees, but what surprised me was the amount of small branches and leaf litter lying everywhere on the ground. It looked to me that the residents must have been using something more powerful than boom boxes, crackers and "scare" guns. Anyway the bulk of the flock seemed to have disappeared. Probably retreated again to the south side I supposed. This means, of course, that the south side residents will retaliate and send them back again to our side of the dividing road. And what are we going to do about it you may wonder. Why, build our own Bat Box of course!
MERRY CHRISTMAS 2006
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