Australia is the world's largest island and its smallest continent.
Australia's forests are complex ecosystems that provide habitats for a large number of plants and animals.
Inside each ecosystem is a hierarchy of dependencies.
Animals are dependent on plants and plants are similarly dependent on animals.
One of the most neglected yet environmentally significant animal species in Australian forests are bats.
For Australian forests, bats are a keystone species because their close relationship with plants is essential to the survival of the forest.
Trees in Australian native forests rely on bats because they are the prime mechanism for pollinating them.
Without pollinating bats, Australian hardwood forests would not regenerate and they would eventually disappear.
Fruit eating bats are the species most responsible for the propagation of seeds of trees in Australian rainforest.
But when rainforest clearing disrupts their natural food chain, bats are forced to forage for food in commercial orchids.
Habitat destruction caused by land clearing as a result of urbanisation and the increased use of land for agriculture and grazing is forcing bats to have more frequent contact with humans.
The result of close encounters with urbanisation, farms and orchards is that bats often become entangled in power lines, barbed wire fences and the netting protecting crops.
Recent habitat destruction has forced some species of Australian bats to migrate to areas where their physiology is unsuited to climatic extremes.
Bats suckle their young for up to six months and during this time both the mothers and babies are extremely vulnerable.
During a recent heat wave in eastern Australia, it was estimated that somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 bats perished through dehydration.
Many of the dead were mothers caring for their dependent young.
Fortunately, volunteer wildlife conservationists rescued many young bats and are nurturing them in aviaries before releasing them back into the wild.
These volunteer organisations are dependent on donations from concerned citizens from around the world.
The donations they receive enable them to buy food for the thousands that immature bats in their care.
Several species of Australian bats are listed as vulnerable. This means that their long-term survival is not assured.
This is of prime concern to all of us because the long-term survival of bats is crucial to the long-term survival of Australian forests and the numerous other species that are dependent on them, including man.
Well, those are the tips for finding救 for people in the woods.
These are the tips for finding wild birds in operations on a fairly difficult level.
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