Wing it: Botanic bats get their marching orders

[depakid]

They're lovely when they're asleep, but when awake they chatter, screech and fight and damage your plants. No, it is not your teenage kids and their mates but the bats in the Palm Grove in Sydney's Botanic Gardens.
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Like parents who tell their teenagers to leave, government authorities have found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Do they let grey-headed flying foxes stay and damage Australia's oldest botanic gardens or do they disrupt a threatened species, hoping they'll move to a new home where they might cause just as much trouble?

Federal Environment Protection Minister Peter Garrett has approved a plan to force the flying foxes out. The survival of the species is threatened by loss of habitat, but the botanic gardens is one home they cannot have any more.

The Botanic Gardens Trust says some visitors may be disappointed at the loss of the tourist attraction, but its executive director, Tim Entwisle, says it is fantastic news for the trees. "After 20 years of damage by the flying foxes and losing 26 of our magnificent trees, we can finally start to relocate them," he said. He says another 300 plants have had some form of damage caused by roosting bats.

From May until the end of July, the Botanic Gardens Trust can play loudspeakers in 10-minute bursts to get thousands of the flying foxes to go.

Under the rules the times when sound bursts can be played will be gradually increased until the bats move off. The ministerial approval requires annual reporting and extensive monitoring and radio tracking of several hundred flying foxes.

If too many die it all has to stop. The annual three-month time limit on using the loudspeakers is "to avoid disrupting the camp during the sensitive breeding and roosting season", according to Mr Garrett.

More: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/14/2900054.htm?section=justin

[drmeow]

1. Federal Environment Protection Minister Peter Garrett

Former Midnight Oil front man.