In the past five years, we have had two super strong category 5 cyclones visit our part of the world in Far North Queensland, Australia – Cyclone Larry in March 2006 and Cyclone Yasi in February 2011. The incredibly strong winds stripped our dense forest foliage naked and as a result, full sunshine caused wild tobacco to grow from the forest floor. Fruit bats normally found foraging in tree canopies were on the ground feasting on tobacco leaves. Here lived paralytic ticks which attacked a huge population of fruit bats causing deaths in the humungous thousands leaving behind 400 orphan babies and 800 adults in the care of the Tolga Bat Hospital. We first visited Tolga Bat Hospital in Atherton sometime January 2007 and photographed the busy volunteers and the tireless Jenny Maclean work non-stop. We didn’t do anything with our photo story as other projects and an expedition to Asia/Pacific took over our lives for a few years. We re-visited Jenny after Cyclone Yasi and finally, we have the Tolga Bat Hospital story in the German children’s magazine GEOlino issued last month, July 2012.
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