Many of us tittered when we heard about iguanas falling frozen from trees in Florida earlier this week. Weather which had no business there was tripping up an invasive species which, likewise, was out of place! (Besides, they may not have died.) But while we've been freezing, Australia has been experiencing record-breaking high temperatures, some of which have been lethal to indigenous species. I read that thousands of flying foxes have fallen from the sky, dead of heat stroke when temperatures topped 47˚C in Campbelltown, NSW - with who knows how many more elsewhere.This grieves me in all manner of ways. Flying foxes are who Deborah Bird Rose writes about in the piece of hers I reference in my piece on religion and the Anthropocene, the joyous fertilizers of eucalypts overflowing with blossom, an invitation to "say yes!" to the mad lovefest of precious precarious life. These creatures of wonder are also ones I know. Indeed I first encountered them in an enchanted glade - in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Melbourne Botanical Garden almost eleven years ago. They are not resilient reptiles like Florida's interloper iguanas. While flying fox carers like those Rose writes about rescued some of the flying fox pups, most are dead, victims of the Age of Man.
