Every evening at dusk above northern New South Wales' Clarence River, thousands of bats fly downstream to feast through the night on the lush sub-tropical fruit plantations. In the silence you can hear their wings dislodging the warm pungent air. Occasionally they swoop low over the river chasing insects or losing touch with the pack.
I was amazed to find the same phenomenon recently in dust-dry rural Rajasthan. As the sun set over the rough-hewn mountains, an endless stream of large bats flew upriver, sticking closely to a course marked by sand and scrub. The river, like most I saw in Rajasthan, ran dry. Tracing the course on google-maps later, I saw the river rise abruptly in the nearby mountains and after meandering and linking with many other tributaries, disappear again in the glaring white expanse of the Thar desert a few hundred km away. Quite where the bats were headed is a mystery, by my friend (bat boy pictured here) reckons it is a nightly pilgrimage. Perhaps there's fruit in them there hills.
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