Which Scares Me More, Flying Foxes or Flying Monkeys?

A few years back, my husband and I traveled to Australia, first to Sydney then to Port Douglas near Cairns.

On our first afternoon there, we walked into town to see the shops and restaurants.

As we are walking down the sidewalk, a small piece of fruit falls from the tree and lands on my husband's shirt, which immediately stained it red.

He’s not happy about it and he looks up, then says,

“Don’t look up”

Well, of course, I am going to look up. I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about, so naturally, I looked up!

When I was young, the movie The Wizard of Oz scared the life out of me. It wasn’t the wicked witch that scared me, she was just mean. It was her flying monkeys. I hated those things and every year the movie was on television on Thanksgiving day and my mother knowing that movie scared me would put it on TV. Maybe it was her way to have me get over it, I don’t know but I never have. I still hate that part.

So, hundreds of bats are hanging from the trees where we are walking. Large black bats with their wings wrapped around them hanging from the tree. The sidewalk is lined with dozens of trees with hundreds of bats in each tree and small pieces of fruit are all over the sidewalks.

I just thought the noise I was hearing was some kind of tropical bird, oh no, it was bats.

Where we live near Seattle, we have a couple of bats that come out at night and eat the bugs. We are happy that they are there for the food chain. But ours are quite small and look more like birds flying in the sky at dusk.

These bats that are above me, are huge. I cross the street, but that doesn’t help, there are more of them. While the roads do not have much traffic I walk in the street when I can.

We go and get a pizza and bring it back to our hotel room. After we got back, the sky started to darken a bit and something went flying past the window.

Oh my lord, what was that? Then another, and another, and pretty soon there are thousands of them in the night sky, the bats.

My husband opens the door and steps out, and they come very close to him, he is astonished and steps back inside. He keeps telling me to go out and look. Nope, not doing it.

After the sky turns to night, we don’t see them and we are off to bed.

The next night we have dinner out at a small cafe. We waited a long time for our food and the service was more on island time, so we lost track of time. We stepped outside not realizing it was already dark.

Oh geez, the flying foxes are out, again. Thousands of them in the sky flying overhead. They are freaking me out and I do my very best gold medal impression of a power walker back to the hotel, with my husband asking me what the rush is about.

The locals don’t even notice them hardly, and I respect the people and the animals of Australia, so I researched them. Port Douglas has a colony of over 10,000 of the Spectacled Flying Foxes, and they may not stay all year round.

They are an endangered species and extremely important for the ecosystem as they are “Australia’s only long-distance pollinators and seed dispersers”.

They can restore areas that have been burned by fire or other climate change volatility, but they can be wiped out during a heat event as well.

They still scare me when I see their extremely large size and thousands in the sky flying but I do realize they are good for the environment. Someday, I may go back, but I will watch them and learn from the inside and not the outside. So, the answer to the question…flying monkeys scare me more!

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