January 16, 2020
Your Help is Urgently Needed to Help Prevent an Entire Australian Species from being Wiped Out - Network for Animals
Australia’s sweet flying foxes are dying by the thousands (probably tens of thousands) in bush fires!
In 1900, there were around 20 million flying-foxes in Australia, a recent survey estimated that there are currently several hundred thousand flying-foxes in Australia. Apart from extreme heatwaves and starvation due to habitat destruction, they also face many threats such as entanglement in netting, being impaled on barbed wire, electrocution on powerlines as well as harassment from residents who live close to flying-fox roosts. The only reason bats have moved in to urban areas is due to lack of flowering and fruiting native trees in bushland which have been either cleared for farming/development, logged for timber or burnt by bushfires.
Network for Animals has teamed up with Friends of Bats and Bushcare (FOBB), an organisation managed by Lawrence Pope in Victoria. He and many other volunteers are caring for flying-fox young orphaned by the heatwaves and bushfires.
Funds are urgently needed to buy specialised flying-fox milk formula such as Biolac for the flying-fox orphans and fruit for when they are older.
Money is also needed to provide immediate specialist veterinary care and for creche fees for when they begin to fly and feed independently. Aviaries and/or release cages are also required when they are flying and need to develop their flight muscles for long distance flights carrying out their ecological role as large, nocturnal bees, spreading pollen & rainforest seeds along Australia's Eastern Coast.
