Beating up on bats has become the favourite pastime of the environmentally ignorant

"The stink is so bad it wakes us at night and we can't open the windows of a day.”

“…I'm always cleaning bat poo off the patio..”
"rodents"

“…. they have to be eradicated,"

"In the summertime, kids swim in there. Quite frankly, their health is at risk,"

These are selected quotes given by the pair pictured above (and a handful of unidentified neighbours) when interviewed in The Mainbrace, Yamba by The Daily Examiner on 19 September 2011.

Sounds like a terrible state of affairs having what is probably a seasonal flying fox camp in a very large reserve on the opposite side of the road, doesn’t it?

The reality is somewhat different. No street thick with guano, no terrible smell, flying foxes roosting to the middle of the wide reserve and not in the trees and shrubs adjoining the footpath and, even at high tide no area suitable for swimming as the reserve is predominately mudflats and marsh with a heavily silted up creek running through its centre.

The clean street

The flying foxes (zoom lens)

Some of the trees at the reserve edge with no flying foxes

A section of marsh