Flying foxes feed through nesting season

The air carries the sound of leathery wings before dawn in this stretch of Maharashtra. Indian Flying Foxes move through the canopy with heavy wingbeats, their meter-wide spans catching the first light as they return from night foraging. These large fruit bats are settling into their breeding season now, and their hunger has intensified. They need more than fruit to sustain the energy demands of courtship, mating, and eventually nursing young.

The Indian beech trees scattered across this landscape provide exactly what the flying foxes require. These native trees bloom in dense clusters of small white flowers, each one heavy with nectar and pollen. A single flying fox can visit dozens of blossoms in one feeding session, its long tongue probing deep into each flower. The bat's face emerges dusted with pollen, which it carries between trees as it feeds through the night. What begins as the bat's search for high-energy food becomes the tree's reproductive strategy. The Indian beech depends on these large pollinators to move genetic material across distances that smaller insects cannot cover.

This relationship intensifies during the flying fox's breeding season because pregnant and nursing females require nearly twice their normal caloric intake. The timing aligns perfectly with the beech trees' peak flowering period in early summer. The bats' increased foraging pressure actually benefits the trees by ensuring more thorough pollination across the population. A pregnant female flying fox may visit over a hundred flowers in a single night, methodically working her way through multiple tree crowns. The seeds that result from this pollination will mature and drop months later, when the bats again need concentrated nutrition for weaning their young. The flying foxes then become seed dispersers, carrying the large beech seeds away from parent trees and depositing them in their droppings at distant roost sites.

The invasive monkey pod and flamboyant trees that now dominate parts of this landscape cannot replace what the Indian beech provides. Their flowers bloom at different times or offer different nutritional profiles. The native partnership between flying fox and Indian beech has been refined across thousands of breeding seasons, each species responding to the other's needs with precise timing. Listen for the soft whistle of wind through bat wings in the early morning darkness. The sound grows fainter as they settle into day roosts, but their night's work continues in the pollen-dusted flowers and the seeds already forming in the warming air.