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Doug Gimesy

Dozens of panting, suffocating gray-headed flying foxes clump together in an attempt to survive 110-degree heat in Yarra Bend Park, outside of Melbourne, in late December 2019. Some 4,500 foxes, including many of these seen here, died over three days in the park. (From “Flying foxes are dying en masse in Australia’s extreme heat,” January 2020.)

A female grey-headed flying fox hangs with her young in a riverside colony in Yarra Bend Park, Victoria, Australia. Mothers typically a single pup at a time, which initially can’t regulate its own body temperature. During this time the mother wraps her young in her wings. When she ventures out at night to feed on fruits, pollen, and nectar, the pup clings to her, clawing her fur and clamping its mouth around her nipple. When pups are older, yet still too young to fly, they’re left behind in the colony’s trees. When Mom returns with nourishment, she and her pup recognise one another among the group by scent and the sound of each other’s calls.

Yarra Bend Park ranger Stephen Brend passes a wheelbarrow filled with dead flying foxes that he and volunteers collected from the ground. Brend, Victoria province's grey-headed flying fox project officer, describes the three-day death event in the park as “carnage.“

Grey-headed flying foxes hang in trees in Yarra Bend Park. About 30,000 of the bats lived in the colony here before December 2019. The bats are vital to their forest ecosystem: They carry seeds and pollinate trees, gardening the forest by night.

Kate Chamberlain, a wildlife rescuer, gives fluids to a dehydrated grey-headed flying fox in Yarra Bend Park.

Wildlife rescuers Kate Chamberlain and Treycee Baker examine the body of a dead grey-headed flying fox they recovered from Yarra Bend Park in early January. The bat's wings were ripped from trauma.

Firefighters from Melbourne's Metropolitan Fire Brigade spray water on the bats clumping on tree trunks in Yarra Bend Park in an attempt to cool them down in late December.

A small colony of penguins lives near St. Kilda's pier in Melbourne, Australia. “Every night sometime after sunset, the adults of the colony will come home to nest,“ says Your Shot photographer Doug Gimesy.   “Occassionally a few can be found standing on the top of the rocks, calling for their mate, drying themselves, or simply watching the world from a different perspective - above the water.“

“Julie is a wildlife carer in Melbourne and has spent four years fostering grey-headed flying foxes (also known as fruit bats), orphaned after their mums were killed by powerlines or caught in backyard fruit tree netting and barbed wire,“ writes Your Shot photographer Doug Gimesy. “She bottle-feeds them six times a day, moisturises their wings with baby lotion and keeps them stimulated with kids’ toys. In the wild, the mother bats would lick them clean, but she draws the line at that.“