They often fly just a few feet above your head, so you can hear them screech and and flap their wings of skin as they go by, so it feels very different than when birds fly overhead. This experience felt scary for the first couple months, but after a while, like most things, you get used to it. I now find them more noisy than scary. I like watching them fly around their nests, and it's funny to see them land and hang upside down.
I've heard that they're not too picky about where they roost, and that they will roost in groups of several hundred bats. There are often so many that you can hear them even before you see them at night. They've been known to live in abandoned buildings or attics, but for the most part I've seen them in trees. They also stay near water, even though they are known as fruit-eating bats. Maybe there's more fruit on the riverbanks?
Fox bats are social animals; they find safety in numbers. They are nocturnal, coming out at night when it's cooler. Like most other bats they have bad eyesight, and they rely upon echolocation— “seeing” with sound—to find their food and avoid flying into things.
None of the flying foxes are endangered. There are a lot of them, particularly in Brisbane. They don't have any predators in the wild, and their biggest threat that I know of is us.
Flying foxes are pretty particular about the weather. It has been really hot lately, to the point where it’s still 90 degrees in the middle of the night.
