His Excellency General The Honourable David Hurley AC DSC (Ret’d) and Mrs Linda Hurley came to Bellingen for the Matthew Locke MG charity rugby league match and also visited schools and community groups.

The couple are keen bushwalkers who care about the environment.

“We’ve been coming up here for seven years and this was something we hadn’t seen,”His Excellency said. “I think its fascinating. There’s a lot of hard work been done and it’s a great community effort to preserve something of the original environment in the valley.”

Bellingen Island, also known as Bat Island, is the only significant remnant of the floodplain rainforests of the lower Bellinger River.

It hosts distinctive plant and bird species, such as white booyongs, strangler figs and giant stinging trees, along with noisy pittas, russet-tailed thrushes, little shrike thrushes and wompoo pigeons.

This summer it was home to a pair of nesting sea eagles, said the Landcare group’s secretary, Ross Macleay.

But its most famous residents are mammals: thousands of grey-headed flying foxes.

Chair of the Landcare group Dorin Hart said research conducted on Bellingen’s bat colony has uncovered information hitherto unknown about the species.

Vivien Jones, author of the photographic book Australian Night Foresters, found that when the bats skim low across the river surface, they are not drinking the water but wetting their chests so that when they roost, moisture drips into their mouth.

PhD student Tim Pearson has been studying the vocalisations they make, and has worked out particular sounds patterns related to assertions of territorial rights and infant demands.

The visit to the island on Saturday morning also turned up something new – the fact that the bats have moved into the regenerated rainforest planted on the island’s western side by the Bellingen Urban Landcare Group. 

“We haven’t seen that before,” Ross said. “I was looking about two weeks ago and there were none here.”

It’s hoped that the expansion of the colony into the new section will take some of the pressure off the original rainforest on the eastern side, which is where Ross and Dorin and the rest of the Bellingen Island Landcare group work on Tuesday mornings, fighting the weeds that are constantly infiltrating via flood waters and from nearby gardens.

If you’d like to help, they can be found enjoying morning tea at 11am near the Dowle St access to Bellingen Island.