A colony of Indian Flying Foxes settles into Kothrud's fig trees

Thirty-five Indian Flying Foxes were counted at a single roost in Satya Sai Nagar, Dhankawadi, in late August, part of a cluster that has held steady across the Kothrud area for the past month.¹ That kind of repeat use, the same handful of canopy trees occupied night after night, is what separates an established colony from bats simply passing through on a foraging circuit.

These are among the largest bats in the world, with wingspans stretching past a meter, and they live in a way that looks almost backwards for a bat: by day they hang out in the open, packed into the crowns of tall trees in full view, chattering and jostling for shade and airflow. Only at dusk do they scatter, sometimes traveling many kilometers overnight to feed on soft fruit and flower nectar before returning to the same roost by dawn. Unlike the small insectivorous bats most people picture, flying foxes navigate by sight and smell rather than echolocation, which is part of why they can afford to roost so conspicuously and why colonies like this one are so easy to census from the ground.

What almost certainly keeps them anchored to this particular patch of Pune is the fig trees still scattered through its older neighborhoods. Sacred fig, cluster fig, and Indian banyan have all turned up within about a kilometer of the roost cluster in recent weeks, and figs are a flying fox staple across their range.¹ The relationship runs both ways: as the bats commute between roost and fruiting trees, they pass fig seeds through their gut and drop them, intact and viable, far from the parent tree. Fig wasps handle pollination, but it is bats and birds that give fig species their reach, and in a dense urban peth with few other large-bodied fruit-eaters covering that kind of distance, this colony may be doing a disproportionate share of that seed-dispersal work.

The roost's location is also its liability. Sacred fig and its relatives are common enough in the area to draw bats into close quarters with dense housing rather than deeper forest cover, and iNaturalist lists the Indian Flying Fox itself as threatened.¹ Roosting over rooftops instead of forest canopy raises the colony's exposure to heat stress on the hottest days, to disturbance from lights and noise, and to the friction that flying fox colonies routinely run into when neighbors object to the smell and droppings under a roost tree. For now it stands as a colony worth simply knowing is there, a working population of a threatened, ecologically useful bat settled in among people who may not realize what it's doing for the neighborhood's fig trees.