Showing posts with label Cairns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cairns. Show all posts

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Australia: Flying Foxes

Flying Fox
We love foxes, and we love bats.  When we realized that Cairns had a colony of flying fox bats, we sought them out.  It wasn’t hard—you can hear them from a few blocks away.  And while we thought they were pretty visibly obvious—you know, Chihuahua sized animals with yard/meter wingspans swooping over head—we were consistently amazed by how many people only glanced up at them after wondering what we were taking pictures of.  In one case, a woman who’d been walking along, perfectly safe, looked at David panning his zoom lens along with a bat, looked where he was pointing, and shrieked and cowered on the ground for nearly 5 minutes before scurrying off in a crouch like she was in a war zone.  Most people were delighted by their chance glance up, however.