At dawn, the volunteers gathered at parks across the city. Some exchanged sheepish glances. If this did not work, they were about to look pretty stupid.
When everyone was in place, someone hit play on a handheld stereo. Booming muzak filled the botanic gardens. Others banged pots and pans and bashed dustbin lids together; anything to create a racket.
In the trees above them, 30,000 flying foxes screeched their displeasure and took flight.
The story of this ambitious operation to move the bats out of the gardens 15 years ago now shapes as one of the country’s most extraordinary wildlife operations.
A “world-first... crazy idea” that “seems doomed to failure”, The Age called it back in 2002. And had it failed, the bats faced being shot.
“Moving thousands of animals across a city with no recorded casualties – and a happy ending – is extraordinary,” says Stephen Brend, the Parks Victoria project officer who cares for the now-thriving colony today.
“And yet the government did not want to talk about it. It’s bats – and people hate bats.”
To understand this story, we need to go back to a cold autumn night in April 2001, a little after midnight.
Lawrence Pope, dressed in all-black, glanced over the bush he was hiding behind at the silhouette of the hunter, whose silenced rifle looked like a long black shadow in the dark.
He nodded at his troops, steeled himself. And then, as one, they exploded across the botanic gardens’ manicured lawns towards the man with the gun, screaming blue murder.
It was the flashpoint in the great Melbourne flying fox wars – a conflict that threatened to tear a city apart, and leave a lot of flying foxes dead.
“We were all prepared to go to prison,” recalls Mr Pope.
“You can’t kill an endangered species in the heart of Melbourne in the opening moments of the 21st century.”
In the late 80s, squeezed out of their native homes by climate change and deforestation, the bats took roost in the botanic gardens.
The grey-headed flying fox is a vitally important native species and pollinator that feeds on flowers across Melbourne.
Unfortunately, during mating season, the little creatures can smell. Pungently. They are also noisy, and botanic gardens' authorities believed they were damaging and killing large trees, many of which were rare and important.
Stephen Brend describes it as Melbourne’s “worst case of public hysteria”. He says the bats barely damaged the trees, and their pollination activities outweighed any damage they might do.
“Everyone got whipped up into a frenzy. Common sense left the debate.”
But garden authorities decided they had to go. They tried many solutions: dog whistles (turns out bats cannot hear them), even spraying cayenne pepper on trees. None of it worked.
Eventually, the gardens called for a cull.
“Over our dead bodies,” replied Mr Pope, the then president of the Humane Society for Animal Welfare.
The organisation had been campaigning to leave the bats in place. Where better for a threatened species than a garden devoted to scientific research, they argued.
“But the botanic had become a corporate entity. It’s no longer a scientific institution, it’s an entertainment precinct. It rents out its gardens for beer gardens and weddings,” he says.
When the cullers were called in, Mr Pope’s small band led a guerrilla resistance, harassing shooters and forming human shields. For every bat killed, they'd kill a tree, they threatened. But it was the mob attack he led that really convinced the government something needed to change – before someone was hurt.
The government ordered wildlife authorities to put their heads together and come up with a better idea – whatever the cost.
A plan was drawn up: scare the bats out of the gardens, and encourage them towards a few target locations where they might be happy to live.
“It had been tried in other cities quite several times – unsuccessfully,” says Rod Van Der Ree, who was working for the gardens at the time.
Hundreds of staff and volunteers were called on. They would assemble in the gardens before dawn and dark every night for a session of noise torture.
“It was almost a military operation. We had communications, observers. We even had a person stationed on a building in the city to try to track where they were flying,” says Simon Toop, who led the project for the Department of Sustainability and Environment. “It was extraordinary at the time.”
First, they spooked them from the gardens – but the bats flew everywhere. So they spent the eight months chasing them across the city, scaring them out of parks, a crematorium, a girls school and a golf course along the way.
Until, finally, they arrived at Yarra Bend Park.
At Yarra Bend, the bats are sleeping, and all is quiet. Despite the sparkling barbecue facilities, and the new bat viewing area, people don’t come here much.
“One woman called me up to complain the bats were ruining her barbecue, and ask if they could be moved,” says Mr Brend, shaking his head.
The leathery little creatures seem happy here. There is plenty of room to groom each other, space to enact the complex social structures of bat life. The colony has grown from 30,000 to more than 50,000.
Do you know, Mr Brend asks, that flying foxes only live 15 years?
"So there's not a bat left in Australia that can remember roosting in the botanic gardens. It's a success. It's over. Melbourne did it."
theage.com.au / the-untold-story-of-how-the-great-melbourne-bat-wars-were-won
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