Gotham City??

Kim and I were walking down our hill to Manly last night to catch some Australia Day festivities. It was twilight, two blocks from our home, and we noticed birds flying erratically about 20 feet over our heads. We looked up and saw against the outline of the fading light the biggest f-ing bat you can imagine. It's wingspan was 4 feet wide. Kim said "that's just like the Batman light in the sky - I thought that was an exaggerated symbol that represented the outline of tiny bats! I didn't know they were really that big"

Later we ran across a colony of them. We were walking down the corso in central Manly and I saw a 3-year old pointing to the tree above us trying to get his dad's attention. We looked up and saw what looked like Koalas or possums or raccoons fidgeting, climbing, grabbing little branches. They were actually these giant bats. Little clusters of leaves were falling all around us because they were so big that if they grabbed onto something too small it would break loose and they would quickly reach to grasp something more substantial. It looked like some of the giant bats would slip and fall right on us. It made me very uncomfortable - but I was mesmerized and couldn't move out of the way.

I did a little research tonight and they are actually "flying foxes" (Pteropus) and here is a link to more information. Amazing, and spine chilling creatures. I hope I see them again - but maybe from a safer distance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_fox

This one is in a zoo - but imagine looking up and seeing 20 of these in a tree right above you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8liMvCKeiQ

Realize that we have very large windows and a triple-sliding-door that we keep open ALL THE TIME. No screens. The sea breeze blowing through here is incredible (and life changing). But if one of these F*ckers flies into our 7th floor bedroom at night by mistake - I'm pretty confident Kim will be cashing a life insurance policy on me. If that happens I hope she writes a blog entry about my final moments of arm-waving, screaming-like-an-eleven-year-old-girl hysteria - I'm sure it will be really, really funny (once the tragedy wears off, of course).

Along these same lines - we played golf for the first time last weekend. The course we played (Wakehurst if you want to google it) is about 5 miles from our house. We encountered two very large snakes. It puts an extra penalty on hitting your ball into the rough. Between the snakes and giant spiders -  I'm not sure how much golf we are going to be playing over here!