Australias prized garden is home to bats

They are big,they are smelly and their landlords are trying to evict them from their prime waterfront homes....

They are big,they are smelly and their landlords are trying to evict them from their prime waterfront homes.

Tens of thousands of grey-headed flying foxes,one of the worlds largest bat species,have taken roost in the Royal Botanic Gardens,a prized preserve for rare plants and trees on the edge of Sydney Harbour. The gardeners want the screeching,scratching animals removed,but conservationists say plans to disperse the bats could endanger an already vulnerable species.

The bats,which are about the size of a house cat with a wingspan of about a yard,stream out of the gardens every evening to feast on fruit trees up to 60 miles away. By day,as many as 22,000 flying foxes nest in the park,squabbling in the branches and leaving the pungent scent of their urine on the pathways below.

But worse than the smell,the gardeners say,the bats are destroying some of the parks oldest trees. At least 12 trees have been killed and about 60 more are at risk of dying in the next two years thanks to the bats,which strip the branches of their new shoots,said Tim Entwistle,the executive director of the Botanic Gardens Trust.

Flying foxes have been camping in the area for nearly two centuries. In the early 1900s,marksmen used to chase the bats from the park with guns. But since the bats were declared a protected species in the 1980s,gardeners have tried to discourage them with strobe lights,water sprinklers,inflatable scarecrows,even python dung.

The bats have not been swayed. So now the Botanic Gardens Trust hopes to drive the bats out with noise,and lots of it.

The trust has applied for permission from state and federal authorities to blast the bats with offensive sounds buzzing chainsaws,leaf blowers,clattering metal played through stereo speakers moved around the gardens on golf carts.

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Those in favour of the plan hope the flying foxes,nomadic animals that divide their time among various camps,will eventually decide to quit the botanical gardens and join a larger colony in one of Sydneys northern suburbs,about eight miles away.

Park managers used the same strategy with some success in the early 1990s and managed to reduce the flying fox population to the hundreds. They stopped the noise,hoping that this smaller population could be maintained,but the bats came back in droves.