Poison Deviny

WHAT a surprise. The long-awaited attempt to shoo away a plague of bats in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens didn’t work. Those disease-ridden little pests, who have killed 200-year-old palms and stripped every green shoot from trees in the rest of the historic harbourside gardens, were blasé about the computerised cacophony that filled the air at dawn and dusk on Monday. It may take a while to dislodge them. But then where will they go? They will be a smelly nuisance wherever they land. Let’s hope it’s not in your backyard. This bat population explosion is no good for anyone. As any farmer will tell you, a bit of gentle culling would be more humane, for the bats as much as for Sydney.

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“GREY-HEADED FLYING FOXES are set to be driven out of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens using industrial noise, after Minister for Environment Protection, Peter Garret, gave his approval today. Grey-headed flying foxes are a threatened species protected under both state and national environment law, and play a crucial role in pollination and seed dispersal in native forests. But the Botanic Gardens Trust applied for federal government approval to remove them after a colony of up to 22,000 animals killed 26 mature trees and 20 palms, while continuing to threaten 300 more. The Trust proposes using industrial noise such as motors and loud banging which has been successfully used in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. Conservationists argued the method there was cruel, but the Trust has already tried deterring the flying foxes with everything from strobe lights to shrimp paste and hanging up bags of python poo.”

Update: Miranda suddenly cares about trees when there’s the possibility of hundreds of endangered flying foxes being killed; ”In her first comments at Brown’s farewell press conference, Milne, 58, made a pitch to rural and regional voters, claiming “the Greens and the bush” simply misunderstood each other. “I’m going out there as a country person to say to other country people it is time that the Greens and country people worked together.” Good luck with that, considering greenies are the chief cause of grief to the bush. Let us count the ways. Forestry towns destroyed by irrational green tree worship.”