Australia's Bats

Moving their horses closer to the forest edge, Jen could make out some type of dark fruit hanging from the trees. “What is that fruit in the trees?”

Billy laughed. “Those are flying foxes, bats. They roost in the trees during daylight. They eat fruit, pollen, and nectar from the trees they forage during the darkness.”

“Our bats eat insects, or at least the ones I know about. They track down insects with sonar ability.”

“Fruit bats don’t need fancy radar devices, they’re after fruit, not bugs. Plus they are rather clumsy, they aren’t the stealthy silent winged insectivores that populate the other parts of the world, and they can’t land worth a shit, they sort of crash land into the trees,” he chuckled. Billy was almost right; the bats evolved to thrive on the flowers from the eucalypt trees. Now with more pressure from people many bats were now eating fruits from orchards now growing in place of the eucalypts.

Flying-foxes, otherwise known as fruit bats, are members of the Pteropodidae family. They have the largest body size of all bats, weighing up to two or more pounds, with a wing span which may exceed three feet.

Although flying-foxes are commonly known as fruit bats, their favorite food is actually the pollen and nectar of eucalypt blossoms,

The grey-headed flying-fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) is the largest member of the family and is a native species that is endemic to Australia on the eastern seaboard – southern Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.