Flying Fox

Yesterday, Niki and I noticed the dog sniffing something in the garden, and wandered over to find a Flying Fox or Fruitbat lying on its back in the late afternoon grass. It was obviously dead, and had been for a while. It started to rain, so we ignored it and decided to deal with it today. This morning, we were going to pick it up and bury it when we noticed something moving on it. Imagine our amazement when, on closer inspection, we realized that it was actually a baby Flying Fox, and it was alive - barely, but alive, trying to move away, or onto the mother´s body! The photos were taken yesterday but, in hindsight, we think that the baby´s body can actually be seen on the left photo, to the right of the mother, under the wing.

Now, in Australia there is an organisation called WIRES, a group of volunteer wildlife rescuers - we called them and in about an hour somebody came round to rescue the baby from its dead mother, whom we had put on a newspaper in the horse float. According to the WIRES man the baby was less than a week old; they can´t fly yet and during that time, we later read, the young Flying Foxes hold on to their mothers with their claws while holding one of her nipples in their mouth. (Ouch!) During the night, the mother flies out to hunt and feed and the young, for the first two or three weeks, are carried along.

Anyway, the baby got taken away, under some squealing protest; and the mother buried under the fig tree. We´ll find out later whether the baby survived...