When I was about ten I decided that I wanted to live in Australia and be a flying vet (like the flying doctors, but for farm animals). Well, that never happened, but I did decide many years later that I really should visit the country I had thought I wanted to live in.
That was the year of the bat. First of all, at the end of summer, I woke up one night to "fluff, klunk, fluff, fluff, klunk" and looked up to see a bat in the bedroom, fluttering and klunking against the window above my head.
I woke Richard up.
"There's a bat in the room."
"A bat?"
"Yes"
"In the room?"
"Yes"
"A bat?"
We left the room, and when we came back the bat was gone.
I didn't think much about it, but about a month later there was an article in our local paper about bats and rabies, and the dangers of being bitten while you sleep... and Richard talked to our local public health people, and after much hysteria we had a series of rabies shots. We had very likely never been bitten, but the bat WAS acting strange and dying seemed like a big price for guessing wrong.
The bat at the top of the page was flying around the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. It's a flying fox - a very large, fruit-eating bat. There are lots of them roosting in the trees in the garden.
| another bat | camel near Broken Hill |
| tree ferns at Maitland's Rest | bowler |
| richard on the beach | Sydney harbor |
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mobar/aus.html
last updated 02/04/02
