14 DAY TRIAL // This past weekend, thousands of bats dropped dead seemingly out of the blue and fell to the ground in Australia. The folks who witnessed the affair are still scratching their heads and trying to make head and tail of the bizarre occurrence.
Clean-up crews are still busy picking up bat corpses. Hopefully, they will manage to find and remove all of them until they decompose to such an extent that the air becomes unbreathable.
It's raining bats, nothing to do but run for cover
As detailed by International Business Times, the incident occurred in the town of Casino in New South Wales. Apparently, it was on Saturday that fruit bats, otherwise known as fox bats, started falling from the sky with no warning whatsoever.
Soon enough, corpses were covering not just streets in the town of Casino, but also people's homes. What's more, locals say that some of the dead bats landed in trees and remained there hanging from one branch or another.
Oddly enough, people living in this part of Australia felt bad for the animals. More so since, of the 5,000 fox bats that died in this corner of the world this past weekend, many were just pups.
“What I saw when I got there was beyond belief. There were hundreds of them all over the ground everywhere I looked,” said photographer Dee Hartin, who chanced to be in the area and caught the incident on camera.
“They were not only on the ground dead but hanging in the trees dead as well. I saw many young ones around three-four months old clinging to their dead mothers or hanging in the trees next to them. It was a horrific sight and I was distressed to see such a massive loss of life,” she added.
It is understood that, while picking up the corpses scattered all over the town of Casino, clean-up crews are doing their best to find survivors and save them. About 100 young bats believed to be less than a month old have been rescued so far.
The young bats have been hydrated and, should they recover, they will be released back into the wild. Specialists say that, even if they feel like lending the animals lying on the ground a helping hand, people should not touch them. This is because, even if in poor condition, the bats can still bite.
What was it that killed these fruit bats?
According to wildlife experts, the 5,000 animals most likely perished after being exposed to intense heat. Thus, this past weekend, the town of Casino in New South Wales, Australia, experienced temperatures of up to 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit).
Unlike other animals living in the area, fruit bats don't do very well in intense heat. On the contrary, high temperatures cause them to experience great stress. In extreme cases, the animals can even suffer a stroke and die. Specialists fear that, should New South Wales be hit by another heat wave in the days to come, many other bats could die.
“Once it hits a certain temperature inside the colony, bats start to suffer heat stress. If we can get into colonies then and spray with water, we can stop the stress becoming heat stroke, which kills them.”
“That's what happened to the colonies that crashed – it went beyond the point where we could save them. So we can only take off the live young that are still attached to their mothers on the ground,” Katrina Faulkes-Leng with Australia's Bat Conservation and Rescue Society told the press in an interview.
