Fly-in-and-camp bats in Noosa defy moves to be forced away
A FORCED dispersal of Noosa's Wallace Park flying foxes is useless and could make the problems worse for other residents as these natural urban invaders use the treed area like "a caravan park".
Noosa councillors are set to vote next week on providing $7000 to have consultants prepare a Wallace Park flying fox management plan.
When told that trying to shift this residential camp of 30,000 bats near the library would be pointless because other flying foxes would just fly in as they move from camp to camp, Cr Joe Jurisevic, with tongue in cheek, likened them to teenage kids with cars.
The council's principal environment officer Peter Milne used another analogy, saying these bat stays were more like a caravan park.
"You've got the longer term residents that stay and then you've got your travellers that come through," he said.
"The animals that you move from any site aren't necessarily going to be the same ones that are going to BE THERE the next night, because they're flying around all the sites all the time."
Mr Milne said the Coolum camp bats also visited Wallace Park.
"Also out at Cooran we've got a small flying fox colony."
He believed complaints that flying foxes had been around in Wallace Park for longer than two years were an exaggeration.
"To clarify that, we've had a small number of flying foxes living in the park on occasion. There could be like 500 there and most people wouldn't know they're there.
"We've got another small colony at Pinnaroo Park that probably not many people know about. There's probably on 20 animals in that park and they don't cause a problem."
Councillor Frank Wilkie asked how the council would do things differently this time as far as management in the light of previous complaints.
"Where there was probably miscommunication last time was the scale of the works. The stakeholders weren't consulted. They didn't realise the site impact," Mr Milne said.
"This time they will go out on site and demonstrate the scale of the impact of the management actions."
Cr Wilkie said: "I guess this has always been about acknowledging that the people who live close to these colonies are under genuine distress and we are sympathetic, but we're not going to embark on expensive exercises that have proven to be ineffective in resolving the problem."
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