When Alan the grey-headed flying fox should have been escaping Canberra's winter by heading for a warmer coastal area, an injury held him back.
Wildlife carers realised he had a cyst on his wing which was stopping him from making the flight north with his colony.
It's a problem tht ACT Wildlife has been working to resolve, by flying the injured animals from Canberra to Sydney for rehabilitation.
The group's flying fox coordinator Clare Wynter said they medicate all the injured bats in individual cages, then once they begin to improve they are put into a larger aviary with other injured bats, both so they can improve their flying and because they are very social creatures.
"What we do is medicate them, keep them in cages, and not on their own. They're very social – they don't like to be kept on their own," she said.
"If they're not well enough to actually be released and fly free by the time it's getting cold – with the frost starting at the end of April, May – we give them a little lift up in a car."
Alan did not fly to Canberra with his family, so it's unlikely he will find them again, but Ms Wynter said Alan would likely take that in his stride.
"They aren't a group which travel in one pack, where they travel with just their family," she said.
"They are a very gregarious social mammal and they'll mix around, so … they're more like backpackers or nomads who wander the landscapes."
'Huge decline' in flying fox numbers
ACT Wildlife carer Denise Kay has been handling injured flying foxes for about 18 years, and said conservation of the species was a "major issue" as developments along the coast compromised their potential food sources.
"They're spreading far and wide looking for food because a lot of the food has disappeared," she said.
"There's been a huge decline in their numbers.
"People say there are thousands and thousands of them, but there were hundreds of thousands. Now they're down to thousands."
Ms Wynter said getting caught in the netting used to protect fruit trees was often the cause of a flying fox's injuries.
"Of the 24, 25 pups that have been caught because they've been injured, 11 of those were caught in fruit tree netting," she said.
"The fruit netting that we used to put on trees 10, 15 years ago had quite large holes in the netting, and we've had massive numbers – 80, 90 bats sometimes – being injured every year caught in this sort of netting."
She said she hoped the ACT government would introduce legislation that would prevent the kind of bird netting causing these injuries.
"[The government] is looking at legislation similar to what Victoria introduced 18 months ago, to require all fruit netting to be a much, much smaller mesh size," she said.
ACT Wildlife has also received funding to help get a handle on the netting issue before it reaches the Legislative Assembly, which they plan use to help Canberrans replace their old, harmful netting.
"They've provided our organisation … $25,000 so we can purchase a whole lot of their friendly netting," she said.
"We will then be in a position where we can swap it with some of the terrible large-holed netting that some members of the public have.
"It's not for orchids, it's going to be for residents in their home gardens."
