Bat colony

Yesterday I took advantage of the quiet after the New Year's celebrations (and hence the exceptional absence of traffic jams) to go and take dozens of pictures of what is the biggest bat colony I've ever seen.


It is truly amazing to see these dense clusters of sleepy or sleeping bats hanging head down from virtually every branch or twig of a long avenue of mainly huge old neem trees.


Sometimes it's a bit difficult to ascertain which tree they dwell in, considering that some seem to have given up growing leaves, the bat population apparently taking all the place... and then some.


They even hang on to bigger branches and trunks.


Some clusters are so dense one wonders how they can sleep at all (and what exactly they are hanging on to: invisible twigs? fellow bats?).


I find it so fascinating that they would live in colonies of thousands, probably tens of thousands. The mind boggles and I just couldn't begin to imagine a way of assessing a range. A lot!


Googling as usual, I discovered that there is a huge colony of bats in Kumasi, supposedly about 400,000 of them. They are called straw-coloured flying foxes and their description make it likely that those in front of 37 Military Hospital are cousins of the Kumasi ones. Below are a few excerpts of the article you can read in full by clicking here:

Flying foxes (a type of fruit bats) are key pollinators and seed dispersers. The fruit of the Iroko tree makes up 88.9 percent of the diet of the straw-colored flying fox during its annual migrations. Aware that Iroko ranks as one of Africa’s most valuable and threatened hardwood trees, I realized that seed dispersal of such an important tree would provide strong economic incentives for the conservation of Ghana’s traditionally persecuted straw-colored flying foxes.

Happy reading! I hope you'll enjoy discovering the fascinating world of bats as much as I did.