That’s the fate of people who share their property with flying foxes.

In northern Queensland, one community has finally convinced the flying mammals to find a new home, after seven years of putting up with thousands of them.

Houses close to the colony in North Eton, south west of Mackay, were covered in bat droppings, and children couldn’t play in the yards because the smelly feces were everywhere.

Each weekend, people wanting to use the nearby bowling club had to wipe the bowls clean, and the smell was unbearable.

But council didn’t allow residents to get rid of the bats, because flying foxes are protected.

It is illegal to kill or significantly disturb them.

Usual acceptable methods to deter them, like bright lights, noise or mist didn’t have any effect.

The bats were there to stay.

Finally, after a long struggle with their local council, resident Jack Long says they received permission to chop down the trees the bats were living in, while those were out feeding.

“These trees had to be cut down and lopped over night time, because if it was done in the day time it would put too much stress on the flying foxes and they might drop dead.”

Twice the bats tried to return, but finding their trees gone, they have now moved on permanently to a non-residential area.

Hungry flying foxes wipe out lychee crop

It’s not only residents who are having a hard time with bats, fruit growers have also had their share of trouble with them.

Flying foxes feed primarily on nectar, but the heavy rain this spring washed all nectar out of blossoms.

That’s why the hungry bats have been plundering fruit orchards instead.

Growers in the Mackay district estimate that more than 150 tonne of lychees have been eaten by flying foxes and parrots.

Tibby Dixon from Sarina south of Mackay says he lost he lost about 90 per cent of his crop.

“Most people in the Sarina district had a great crop, until the rain started in late October and with all the rain came the marauding flying foxes and parrots, and some orchards were totally wiped out.”

The Australian Lychee Growers Association says the Mackay, Townsville and Cairns regions usually produce between 30 and 40 per cent of Queensland’s lychees.

Tibby Dixon says there is going to be a shortage of lychees and they can’t export the fruit they had planned to.

“In a normal year we get about five to ten per cent damage, and this year it was about 90 per cent damage.”

He says he would prefer the government allowed farmers to protect their crop, instead of bats.

“Up until a few years ago we were allowed to get a mitigation permit and we were allowed to protect out crop by getting the scouts.

“And if you get the scouts you stop them from telling the others to come back and have a free feed.

‘But at the present we are not allowed to do that.”

And with less to harvest, it also affected the number of seasonal jobs the lychee harvest creates.

“The community loses out.

‘We’d normally have between 40 to 50 pickers a year, so there are 40 to 50 pickers that haven’t got a job.”

Story on ABC website: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2010-12-25/battling-bats/6192040

Longer related interview on ABC Rural: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-01-05/lychee-harvest-decimated-by-flying-foxes/6192056

In East Timor, where many subsistence farmers face an annual “hungry season,” Australian-funded aid program Seeds of Life is boosting crop yields by distributing higher-yielding seed varieties.

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Audio Script:

Poor yields and unpredictable weather are part and parcel of any farming operation, but imagine the impact it can have when your average income is less than a dollar a day.

That’s what farmers earn in East Timor, where hunger has a season of its own. Australian aid agencies are working closely with locals to improve the situation.

Nicky Redl reports from East Timor.

NICKY REDL: Food insecurity is a serious issue for people in rural areas of East Timor in Southeast Asia.

Farmers don’t have big acreages, and the dry season lasts for eight months of the year. Having enough food to feed their families is for many people a constant struggle.

One of the ways to improve living standards is to plant crops that produce more than the traditional varieties.

The identification, testing, and distribution of such seed varieties are what the Australian-funded aid organization Seeds of Life has been working on for the past ten years.

Rob Williams is the program’s team leader.

ROB WILLIAMS: It’s been a very steep learning curve for me, coming from an Australian business model of farming to a subsistence style of farming.

Telling people to put on fertilizer or putting this pesticide here doesn’t work in Timor. People have no access to fertilizer. People have no access to herbicides.

So you have to look at technologies that are suitable for subsistence farmers, and varieties are a very good technology that way. The technology reproduces itself.

Each farming family here farms their one hectare of land and they plant a large range of crops. It is not just corn, but it’s beans, it’s pumpkin, sweet potatoes, cassava. They harvest each species in turn and store them away for the whole of the dry season.

So they get one shot at producing enough food for themselves.

NICKY REDL: And how many people manage that, to produce enough food for themselves and their family?

ROB WILLIAMS: We suspect that most of them don’t produce enough food for their family for the twelve months of the year. Most families have what we call a hungry season here in East Timor, where there is not enough food produced to feed their families.

NICKY REDL: What are the key focus areas at the moment that you are looking at?

ROB WILLIAMS: For us, corn is one of the biggest focuses. Most people in East Timor eat corn every day.

Our current release corn varieties are yielding 40 percent more than the traditional local varieties that people grow. That means for the same amount of work, the same amount of land, they produce 1.4 ton per hectare instead of the 1 ton per hectare.

This brings families from barely enough food to having a surplus of corn for the twelve months of the year.

Our focus in the next few years is to identify even higher-yielding maize varieties that keep well, that taste good, and giving farmers access to those seeds across the whole country.

NICKY REDL: Glen da Costa has been testing new varieties of corn on his farm near Baucau a few hours drive east of Dili.

He says the variety called Sele is very strong. It’s not getting knocked down by wind as easily as local varieties, and it has a very high yield. He says one plant can have two or three cobs, and each cob is big.

So after receiving five kilos of this corn variety from Seeds of Life last year, this year, he could harvest enough to plant the stronger variety on his whole farm.

Rob Williams says the program’s biggest achievement is that they have been able to distribute enough seed to farmers that the government didn’t need to import any this year.

ROB WILLIAMS: Last year, we distributed more than 80 tons of rice seed to farming families and 20 tons of maize seed. Every year since 1999, which is when East Timor separated from Indonesia, the government of East Timor has important maize seed and rice seed to distribute to farming families in need.

This last wet season, the East Timorese government didn’t import any seed. So this year, because of seeds of life, this country was self-sufficient for modern, high-yielding seed.

NICKY REDL: Generally, this country is still a food importer. Do you think it has the capability in the future to be self-reliant there?

ROB WILLIAMS: It certainly does. It’s a country of 1.1 million people, with 44,000 hectares of rice, about 80,000 hectares of corn production. With the appropriate inputs, the appropriate guidance, the appropriate direction to the farmers, there is no reason why this country couldn’t be food sufficient.

(Farmers talking and laughing)

NICKY REDL: And while life on the land is very tough for farmers here, they still find always plenty to laugh about – for example, my name. In the local language called Tetum, Nicky means bat, like the nocturnal flying mammal, and that, they reckon, is pretty funny.

(More laughing)

Broadcast in June 2010 on ABC Radio Australia, an ABC international broadcast service