War Of The Flying Fox

• Cameron Smith, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2010

On a bright day I was rummaging around for food. We have lots of food at the sewerage treatment plant. My colony of black flying foxes live here and we love it. We help get food for our young babies. We hate the humans walking past with something that causes the grass to become short. We bats want to know why do you play with that thingamabob? We just want to know why, because it wakes us up from our beauty sleep. Humans are very annoying. As I ranted and raved about humans to myself, I smelt that something was wrong.

I was hanging in my tree when I felt a cool breeze and a big shift, my tree was falling. I quickly let go and flew out. My colony was frantically flying everywhere. I was confused, huge machines were cutting our homes down. I flew down and tried to stop the monster machines. But I could not cause them to cease. I kept trying and trying and trying but they just kept working. “Nooo!” I screeched. Why, why? My big brother is dead! Nooooo! Why did this happen?

We flew for days and days, we had started to lose hope. We were lost but we saw something in the distance- a home. We flew past but there was already a colony of bats there. We flew again until we saw another home but the humans shot at us, so continued on our journey to find a new home.

Finally a lush green park came into our sights and we decided to settle there. We love it in Lissner Park. There is plentiful water and food.

Again the humans are shooting at us. It’s not fair. Some bats are injured. We need a home and every time we find one the humans destroy it. They think we are ruining their habitat… but what about what they do to ours?