Pollinators and Ipad Heads
Once upon a time, children would play outside and peak under stones for millipedes. These were days of fresh air and chasing games, where the only screen in sight was your friend’s malnourished Tamagotchi. Everything changed one day when my generation got cramps after only leaving 53.5 minutes between dinner and Tip-The-Can and we retreated inside to recover.
Inside, there were discoveries as momentous for a child as the finding of a cheap petrol station for an adult. Technology had blessed us with, among other things, opportunities to help an Italian Plumber jump over pipes. We sat down to play, losing six-packs earned from playing Build-up and gaining muscly thumbs, the Outdoors forgotten.
By the time my cousins, conveniently christened Oldest (12), Middle (6) and Youngest (4), began their mortal coil, touchscreen had defeated the game controller. Muscly thumbs ceased and eyes went square. This was brought home to me when I visited them in Australia and found their faces had been replaced by iPads. I was shocked. How could they hunch over their screens while there were rockpools to peruse, stones to overtone for insects and birds and frogs to gawk at. Desperate to install some nature into their lives I marched them towards the local creek.
It was a typical Sydney suburban creek, lined with eucalyptus trees and complemented by a traffic cone fishing in the river. I was soon talking Youngest and Oldest out of sitting in an abandoned trolley while Middle bounced on a grubby sofa in blatant defiance of standard hygiene, occasionally propelling himself into the dense undergrowth. But trolleys and sofas were forgotten when they saw the camp of grey-headed flying foxes which clung upside down to the branches of the eucalyptus. Oldest was still wearing his school uniform so we thoughtfully kept a distance from the bats to prevent him being slagged in school for reeking of bat poo.
Flying foxes operate a city-wide gardening operation. They can travel up to 50 kilometres in a night, sampling nectar from trees across Sydney’s twinkling cityscape. As they do this, pollen from the trees’ flowers catch on their fur and rubs off onto the next flower. In urban landscapes where trees are separated by vast concrete jungles, aerial gardening is the most effective way for trees that are not necessarily close by to reproduce with each other. Some eucalyptus trees are so dependent on these fruit bats that they only pollinate at night.
But the bat’s fate is entwined with our warming climate. Australia is experiencing hotter summers, and when the temperature exceeds 42°C, flying foxes begin to die in large groups from heat stress. As females give birth to one baby a year, populations are slow to recover. If the flying fox is lost, many of the fifty tree species they pollinate will be lost too, drastically changing Sydney’s forest ecosystems forever.
As afternoon faded to evening the creek came alive with their chattering and wing-stretching. By now, Youngest and Middle had collapsing with hunger and were escorted away with the promise of pizza. Oldest bravely decided to ignore the pleas of his stomach and remained to watch the chaotic cacophony of fruit bats. We stood in peaceful silence. The darkening sky turned pink and before I knew it, I had my phone out, trying to capture the silhouettes of the flying bats on camera. After several minutes of fiddling with the phone, Oldest turned to me, saying “You’re missing it all”.
And I realised I was. After all my grumbling about my cousins being distracted by technology, and deprived of nature, here I was on a phone while Oldest watched several hundred bats without distraction. He began talking about other things he had seen: parrots which visit his school yard, whales he had seen off the coast and the dugong that consumed a forest of lettuce each day at Sydney’s aquarium. Then he told me that many of the problems facing bats and other wildlife are caused by us and my preconceived notions of my cousins being separated from the outdoors were called into question.
We have a responsibility to the next generation to familiarise ourselves with the plight of our ecosystems and learn what can be done. At the very least, we must show them as many natural spectacles as we can before they disappear. But perhaps children aren’t quite as separated from nature as we adults are, with social media, work, and life clambering for our attention. Perhaps we need to learn from them in order to deepen our connection.
Our stomachs began a rumbling chorus that soon drowned out the shrieks of the bats so we reluctantly set off for home, leaving the night to the possums, the moon and these winged gardeners, propagating the forest until they can bear the heat no more.