Cesnnock Council has launched an online survey to allow residents to share their thoughts on how to deal with the city's flying fox problem.
There's been a flying fox camp at East Cessnock for a number of years, but a population explosion at the beginning of this year has seen the number of bats reach an estimated peak of 30,000.
It's made living in the neighbourhood unbearable for residents as well as staff and students at the nearby primary school, who have to cope with the excessive noise, odour and mess made by the protected species.
In frustration, some residents decided to take matters into their own hands, with at least four fires lit beneath the bat colony during a week in May in the hope of destroying or driving the creatures away.
The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage responded with $10,000 being given to Cessnock Council to develop a flying fox management plan.
Council, in conjunction with the Office of Environment and Heritage and the Department of Industry - Lands, has now created a web portal for residents to provide input via an online survey which will then be considered in developing the management plan.
The survey includes a range of options on managing the flying fox camp for residents to consider.
It takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete and can be found at:
http://www.flyingfoxengage.com/eastcessnock
Council's Principal Natural Environment Planner, Ian Turnbull said the survey is also a good opportunity to educate and better inform the community about flying foxes.
"Flying foxes and their behavior is really quite complex and there's a lot of assumptions about flying foxes, so any opportunity to change some of those assumptions is a good one," he said.
Of those assumptions, "One of them is, everyone says 'let's get rid of the flying foxes', and that's extraordinarily difficult, complex and often unsuccessful, so we would like to try to increase some of the awareness in some of these issues," Mr Turnbull said.
