Go niche

High flyer: one of the 22,000 flying foxes that live at Sydney's botanic garden. Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty

SANDRA O'CONNELL

Sydneysiders must be looking nervously at their trees about now. Their city’s Royal Botanic Gardens has had enough of the unwanted guests in its arboretum – a colony of 22,000 flying foxes.

The fruit bats, whose furry bodies really are as big as foxes’, and which have wingspans to match, are squatting in one of the city’s most popular tourist spots. Four million people visit the 30-hectare garden each year to see 11,000 plants.

The flora quickly loses its lustre once you look up and realise you are on the set of a horror movie, with thousands of “vampires” hanging upside down over your head or, worse, flapping languorously towards you. And as well as being as creepy as hell, the bats carry rabies.

As flying foxes are a protected species they can’t be culled. They can be moved on, however, which is why, after 20 years of the bats camping out, the park has adopted a “bad hotel” solution, playing loud noises throughout the day, to spoil their sleep and, it hopes, persuade them to move to other parts of the city. (The public have until December 23rd to respond to the proposed relocation.)

Which means that unsuspecting householders could soon look out of their windows to find some of the 22,000 bats clinging to their herbage.

rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au