Rozza is an adult male GreyHeaded FlyingFox who crash landed in a lightwell/courtyard area between two terrace houses.
This is the usual sort of rescue for this time of the year; usually adult males who are more adventurous looking for food in these times of scarcity. The rain has washed out most of the nectar and pollen from the blossom; the blossom is stimulated by the rain, but the food value is lost and finding food is harder for the bats still in the locality over winter.
I totally walked past him when I went into the courtyard, but the cleaner alerted me to where he was, hanging on the woodpile.
In care with the carer, he wasn't able to hang well on day 2; well, he pretended he was OK but after about 10 minutes when the carer went back to check on him, he was hanging very low and supporting himself in the corner of the cage with both thumbs. 4 point hanging means he's still quite dizzy and definitely not ready to fend for himself. Because the carer was running a course on the weekend, I went and collected him for another night's care, lounging around in the incubator.
By day 3 he looked a whole lot better, so I took him back to the carer's home to hang with the other bats (Quai, Derek, Tafia, Jenner, BJ and Sweden).
Jess was going to be along later to hang out the food for them, so I asked her to check on him and see how he was hanging. She said he was 4 point hanging, so I was going to come collect him however the carer drove home from the country course last night so he's with her still.
He hasn't "fallen over" (which is the term we use to describe how they look great at rescue and for the first 12 hours, then suddenly are really unwell and end up dying), so I expect he's a survivor, but taking a while to recover from his concussion. He'll be test hung every day to see how he's managing.
Since I don't normally do this aspect of care, I thought you'd like to see how despite them looking great sometimes, they really aren't well at all when you set them to hang. I thought Rozza was ready to hang, but by the time Jess got there half an hour later, he was 4 point hanging and hunched and huddled into a corner.
All this was lost in the fuss when one of the dogs got out and a search was made, not finding her, only to find she had been in the house the entire time and it was just that the gate blew open.
Rozza's name comes from the road, Roslyn Gardens.
It's an Aussie thing to turn Darren into Dazza, Sharon into Shazza, Ross into Rozza... (and apropos of nothing, any redhead gets called Bluey...)