Two Wallabies = Cute. Hundreds of Bats? Not So Much

On Wednesday, Carol and I flew to Cairns, which is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef in Far North Queensland (FNQ).

The wallabies were quite agile.

Ooh, Ooh, Ooh, Looking out my front door.

It was supposed to be a relaxing beach day at the Kewarra Beach Resort.  The resort was beautiful, but the weather wasn't very cooperative.  It was overcast and windy -- so windy that the flying sand chased us off the beach for a while.  So, we went to the pool.  It started to rain nearly as quickly as we got settled in our lounge chairs, so we headed back to our bungalow.  We sat on the deck and read for a while, listening to the waves.

Our bungalow, on the edge of 

the beach in the FNQ rainforest.

The resort is a beautiful setting -- rainforest meets the beach.  We weren't far from the beach, but there were beautiful trees surrounding our bungalow.  Suddenly, Carol started -- "kangaroos!"  Turns out the two were actually Agile Wallabies, which are part of the kangaroo family.  They were wandering nearby, eating leaves from bushes and grasses.

Kewarra Beach

I stalked them with my camera, and Carol shot a short movie of them.  After ten minutes or so, they seemed to finally get nervous around me, and they hopped off quickly.  I didn't make them that worried, because there were numerous times when they looked at me and then went back to eating.

A while afterwards, the wind had died down enough that I went swimming -- the only person in the water on the whole large beach.  There were some people from town walking their dogs, but I had the Pacific Ocean to myself.  We then walked along the beach, watching the dogs play and the waves crash.

Our charming dinner location.  The bat crash

came on the other side of the roof.

See, it's not just wine.

I had arranged for dinner on the beach at 6pm.  With the wind, they moved us back a bit (but still by the beach).  At 6:30, the sky filled with bats -- hundreds and hundreds.  We freaked out a bit as they flew past us.  Suddenly, one flew right at us, ramming into the thatched cover above us.

Dinner pre-bat fly-by

It slid down, falling to the ground, where it crawled to the nearest tree and shimmied up, presumably to fly off.  We were too scared to run, because we didn't want to attract their attention.  Apparently, according to our waitress, they fly at the same time every night (and, we watched for them the next night, and they did!).

Just a few of the bats.  When the first huge groups 

flew past, I was more focused on not getting

attacked then of getting a good picture!

Dinner was great on the beach, but we were a little on edge after the bat fly-by.  Since bats in FNQ live in colonies numbering in the thousands, it is possible we saw more than 1,000 fly past us.

Freaky.

A less freaky dinner companion.