“Over a month ago I said the bats have got to go, and since then they’ve done jackshit,” Councillor Milton Leslight said.

The story featured an interview with parents who had lost a child who had contracted bat lyssavirus, and Cr Leslight believes that such an event must be avoided at all costs in Batemans Bay.

“The kid got scratched, and how many kids wouldn’t think about the danger of going near bats?” he said.

“I brought the bats up with Rob Noble when he was interim council general manager, and he said ‘you’ll just have to live with it’. I said that’s just not good enough. I brought it up again at a meeting three weeks ago, but it seems that certain councillors don’t live near the bats so they aren’t affected.”

Cr Leslight believes that grey-headed flying foxes should lose their vulnerable species status.

“They are certainly not vulnerable,” he said.

“The vulnerable species are the people living near them.”

Ken Burn, whose Old Princes Highway home backs onto the Water Gardens, would like to see something done.

“The bats shouldn’t be in this town; they’ve got diseases and germs,” he said.

“You can’t even use water out of a rainwater tank because of them pooing. I have told the council to get them out of the town by cutting the trees down and clearing out the area, but they say ‘no, we can’t do that’. Some people think they are a great thing, the do-gooders.”     

A census of grey-headed flying foxes was taken in February, at camp sites including the Water Gardens. It found that there are about 455,000 of the animals in NSW.