Pacific Nature

Notes

Conducted By Raimanu

No. 3 —Bats Mostly we call them “flying foxes” although we know they are really not foxes at all, but bats.

Just before dark they go flapping slowly across the sky to their feed ing grounds for the night. If there is a mango tree handy to your house you will be familiar with these visitors, or perhaps they will come and feed on your ripening banana bunch, or even a few pawpaws.

In Merauke, Dutch New Guinea, in 1944 we were used to seeing these creatures in their thousands each evening, leaving their “camp” near the mouth of the river to move in land to feed. There were other big camps of this kind on the Digoel River too, to the west.

Such big camps of flying foxes seem less common in Fiji, I re member seeing only one, and that was on the shore of Viti Levu Bay just beyond Nanukuloa, where the bats were settling down in the early morning as we passed along the road.

The Fijians consider the flying fox a delicacy. They say that once the skin has been burnt off, by tossing the carcase into the fire, the smell for which the animals are infamous disappears. I am told that flying-fox is not unlike young chicken to eat.

Then there are the little bats, common wherever there are big caves. They no doubt do quite a bit of good, snapping up mosquitoes.

Women in one of the villages not far from Na Savusavu, Fiji, some times take one of their fishing nets to a cave nearby and catch some of these small bats. I asked—what for? Surely they are not big enough to eat? The answer was— not to eat, but for the children to play with.

Dr. K. B. Noad on February 4 received the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Sydney University as a result of his thesis on scrub typhus (or Japanese River Fever) which is prevalent in Papua-New Guinea.