The Bendigo Easter Fair may need to leave the city centre if Rosalind Park's controversial flying fox colony grows larger, a key stakeholder in the city's biggest annual tourist event says.
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The fair society has written to Greater Bendigo councillors raising concerns about the bats' continued presence in the city centre park.
Group president Simon Mulqueen told them the 152-year-old event was at risk "and may be forced to move out of the CBD".
"Can we seriously bring people to Bendigo so they can sit in bat excrement and experience the stench and noise that accompanies the bats in Rosalind Park[?]" Mr Mulqueen asked in the letter emailed to civic leaders on Wednesday, August 9.
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"Ultimately the bats will have a detrimental effect on general tourism numbers and in fact people may stop coming altogether to visit the CBD, if it remains 'uninviting'."
Mr Mulqueen said the park was fast becoming an unusable "bat sewer" shunned by the community.
He told the Advertiser no decision had been made to move any Easter events out of the city centre but that the matter needed to be discussed given the bats were not going anywhere.
"If it continues to increase in its severity, we would not have any choice," he said.
"We've been able to avoid it in the past because they were mostly in the fernery but as you can see when you go to the park, they are everywhere."
It is too early to know what events the society would want to pull from the city centre, though it would likely want to keep the parade there.
The society would not have the final say. While it is a key stakeholder on a reference group for the Easter Festival it does not manage events in Rosalind Park.
The council runs those particular events and has no plans to move the animals on, tourism and major events manager Terry Karamaloudis said.
"At this point in time, there are no plans to make any changes to the Bendigo Easter Festival and the activities held in the park," he said.
The society used its letter to the council to say it wanted assurances about the safety of events in the park given bats can carry diseases.
Wildlife rescuers have said the public health risk was low and the dangers were linked to people getting bitten when handling them.
"It is incredibly unfortunate that so many misconceptions exist regarding these unique mammals," Wildlife Rescue and Information Network spokeswoman Michelle Mead said in 2017 when a Rosalind Park advisory committee suggested bat numbers "appear to be more of a plague than a colony".
She said the unique odour associated with flying foxes originated from the male and was used to mark his territory and attract females for breeding - not as a result of their urine or faeces.
Bat numbers change throughout the year depending on food sources and the Rosalind Park colony can drop to a few thousand before rising again.
The species is threatened and was hit hard by the catastrophic 2020 bushfires which destroyed much of the forests they migrate through.
They are a central plank in the wider ecosystem because one flying fox can spread as many as 60,000 seeds in one night.
Flying foxes started the Rosalind Park colony in 2010. The council initially tried to move them on with air horns and, when that did not work, a stock whip.
As it became clear the animals would stay, the council changed park management practices, even setting up an aerial cooling system in the park's fernery in 2020 to stop bats dying of heatstroke on hot days.
The council said it was legally obliged to reasonably accommodate the native animals under state and federal laws.
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Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
