Adelaide fruit bats cop blame for $1m in power outages

Fears of viruses and power outages caused by Adelaide’s fruit bats are boiling over into abuse aimed at animal rescuers, volunteers say.

Bat rescue volunteers cop abuse and road rage when fruit bats are blamed for causing blackouts, damaging crops and stealing homegrown produce.

Shane McCann from Fauna Rescue said reports at this time of year about young bats causing blackouts tended to fuel negative sentiment in the community.

“We were getting things thrown at us, people were rolling down their windows abusing us and saying ‘What are you saving those F’ing things for, they’re causing all our power blackouts and they’re bringing all the viruses’,” she said.

“We were getting road rage and we were getting abused, because we’re advertising that we’re helping these animals and the media are portraying them as being demons.”

Ms McCann leads the Talking Batty Education Team, offering guided tours of the colony at Botanic Park and providing advice on protecting backyard fruit with bat-friendly bags, as well as rescuing damaged, electrocuted or heat-stressed bats.

Most bats are not killed by the electric shock, but they suffer such severe injuries such as loss of limbs, wings or digits that they need to be put down.

Two grey headed flying foxes being treated at Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital. Picture: AAP/Darren England)

After two mild summers, Adelaide’s growing fruit bat colony has swelled to 36,000.

The breeding season has also started earlier, so more immature bats are taking to the skies and colliding with power infrastructure causing outages than usual.

Bat-related power outages occur mainly between February and April so far there have been 122 this year.

However, head of corporate affairs Paul Roberts said bats were not responsible for all of the blackouts. Animals caused only 13 per cent of outages since January 1 and bats were responsible for about half of those, while possums and birds represented the other half.

Grey headed flying foxes, also known as fruit bats, are a protected species nationally listed as vulnerable to extinction. They established a colony in SA in 2010 after arriving from the eastern states in search of food.

They like blossoms best, especially eucalypt flowers, so they really should be called blossom bats, a Green Adelaide board spokeswoman said. But they also “munch on figs, apples, pears and dates from date palms”.

Lenswood Apples director Ashley Green said the colony sent out “scouts” to search for food and report back. “They scratch the apples to find out what’s ripe,” he said.

Fellow director Michael Stafford said growers suffered considerable losses in previous years, but netting the orchard to protect the crop was very expensive so he wanted more support from state and federal governments.

Linda Collins has been working with flying foxes for 34 years, including 22 years on the east coast from Pambula in the south to Rockhampton in the north and for the past 12 years in South Australia.

She said most people in Adelaide had embraced the animals, which are crucial to the ongoing health of the nation’s diminishing native forests becuase they spread pollen and seed.

“Flying-foxes are what is referred to as a keystone species,” she said. “Every Australian native animal that relies on our forest trees to survive - koalas, possums and most bird species - requires the flying-fox to continue in adequate numbers, to keep these forests healthy.”

A bat pictured at Botanic Park. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

Dark nights rising? It’s the bats, man

SA Power Networks is spending a million dollars a year insulating powerlines and upgrading infrastructure to ease bat-related blackouts.

Head of corporate affairs Paul Roberts said the spend on bat mitigation measures increased in the past couple of years, was “targeted, not willy nilly” and “may well go up” over time.

Last year SA Power Networks recorded 82 bat-related power outages impacting 240,000 customers. Figures show problems are concentrated in the northeastern suburbs.

So far this year there have been more than 20 longer-duration outages when normally only “a handful” would have been expected at this stage.

Mr Roberts said SA Power Networks would not support a cull, which could never happen because the bats are a protected species.

“We are investing more than a $1 million per annum on mitigation efforts and will continue to look at options to reduce the number of animals injured or killed by contacting our state’s electricity infrastructure,” he said.

“Mitigation includes installing line and pole top coverings where we have repeat bat-related outages and replacement of old-style lightning surge arrestors which can trap the bats when they land on top of poles.

“The latter is a long-term task as there are millions of the old-style surge arrestors known as Rod Air Gaps installed across the system.”

Customers experience either extended outages or short “momentary” outages, which is when equipment reconnects power if the animal falls clear after contacting electricity infrastructure.

A program of “sectionalising” high-risk lines has helped reduce the number of customers impacted by these outages.

After dusk every evening, the grey-headed flying foxes can be seen “streaming” out from their home base in Botanic Park, Green Adelaide ecologist Jason Van Weenen said.

There may be five to ten different streams, with many following the path of the River Torrens northeast into the hills, or west to the beach.

Unfortunately the young ones that are learning to fly at this time of year tend to rest on power lines and can be electrocuted when they try to take off again.

Green Adelaide is working with SA Power Networks, researchers at the University of Adelaide and animal welfare organisations “to best mitigate power outages and ensure the welfare of this threatened species”, Mr Van Weenen said.

“We didn’t have flying foxes in South Australia (until 2010) so our power infrastructure hasn’t been set up to cope with them,” he said.

“The wires are closer together because we haven’t had the issue of flying foxes in the past, which have a really large wingspan ... (of) about a metre.”

Animal welfare organisations report electrocuted bats to SA Power Networks so they can identify sources of multiple fatalities or injuries.

Sue Westover of Bat Rescue SA at Wynn Vale said SA Power Networks was supportive and helped by insulating power lines, installing protective discs and trimming feeding trees that are too close to powerlines, but it was a slow process.

“Of course it’s going to take many years for it to all be all be fixed,” she said.

Ms Westover said there were more young bats this year because “we didn’t have a big heat stress event”.

“Normally, over the summer we might lose at least, anywhere between 2000 and 8000 babies due to the heat but of course we didn’t this year because we never had any big heatwaves,” she said.

“Most of the babies survived the summer ... and also the bats are losing their habitat interstate, in the eastern states, which is why they’re coming across here, joining up with our colony.”