Yes, you read the title right: there’s a healthy population of Short-Nosed Fruit Bats in Victoria Park, Causeway Bay! I first discovered these cool critters about four years ago, when I was really into mammal watching. They’re quite comfortable roosting in close proximity to people during the day, and at night they pan out from their daytime roosts to search for fruit. Their roosts are actually built out of the leaves of the Chinese Fan Palm, a very common tree in Victoria Park and other urban parks throughout the city, so searching the undersides of palm fronds usually leads to some bat sightings. Yesterday when I went to the park to find some, I had felt like I’d been doing a lot of birding the past few months, but that I hadn’t given much time to seeking out my other favorite group of animals: mammals. So, with that, I set out mammal watching.

I arrived pretty late in the afternoon (4:00pm), and I immediately started searching the undersides of palm leaves for bat colonies. To build a roost, a male Short-Nosed Fruit Bat bites the underside of a palm frond in a circular formation, making a little “tent” for him and his harem of females to rest under during daylight hours. They can be quite hard to spot as Chinese Fan Palms easily grow to over 15 meters high, and I stupidly left my binoculars at home which made it even harder. There were many abandoned “tents”, where a colony of bats used to live, and were easily distinguishable from the surrounding fronds.

About 20 minutes later, I had searched probably 3 dozen palms and couldn’t see any bats. This was worrying as last time I’d seen several colonies within ten minutes of entering the park. As I searched a palm close to a tennis court, however, luck hit me. There was a colony of 5 adorable little Short-Nosed Fruit Bats not 10 meters away!

I left to search more trees, but after looking under basically every other Chinese Fan Palm in the park and seeing no more active colonies, I called it quits around 5:15. I went back to the bats for some photos and left the park satisfied about my find. Along the way, I also saw some birds, including two noisy Yellow-Crested Cockatoos, a bird introduced into Hong Kong about a hundred years ago. Today, around 70 of them live and breed on Hong Kong Island. Because only about a thousand are left in the wild, Hong Kong is a key conservation site for this critically endangered species.

In Hong Kong, finding wild mammals is easier said than done (apart from Rhesus Macaques in the Kowloon Hills, and Wild Boar pretty much everywhere). While I have seen several elusive species of wild mammals after 5 years of systematically searching the territory (like the fruit bats), I still want to do more mammal watching excursions to my most successful spots to find some over the coming months. Thanks for reading as always and stay tuned,

-Bennett

Mammal Species Recorded: (1 total)

Short-Nosed Fruit Bat

Bird Species Recorded (6 total)

Yellow-Crested Cockatoo

Red-Whiskered Bulbul

Masked Laughingthrush

Oriental Magpie-Robin

Rock Pigeon

Eurasian Tree Sparrow