Africa: Kasanka Fruit Bats { 88 images } Created 2 Jun 2014
Each year in November there is a remarkable gathering in northern Zambia: from all over Sub-Saharan Africa Straw-coloured Fruit Bats congregate. Between 12 and 15 million bats descend on a patch of forest that you could almost throw a table cloth over. Their combined weight is such that branches snap. At dusk they leave their patch of forest and fly off to forage, blackening the sky. At dawn they return to their roosts in noisy chattering masses. This annual migration is the largest aggregation of mammals in Africa, perhaps five times the number of animals that so famously move around the Serengeti-Mara in East Africa. I visited Kasanka in late November 2013 on assignment for Terra Mater magazine. The resulting feature article was published in April 2014.