Someone once told me that the best way to get to know a city is to walk through it at just about sunrise. He’s right. It felt like a different world, not like Sydney  in the daytime and not like Sydney at night. There was something darker about the dark, quieter about the quiet. We walked through the orange patchiness of lit streets and paths, and finally off the pavement and into The Domain. No color there. The grass and the trees were black, and the bird calls were more frequent and exotic, a kookaburra laughing, something chittering in a nearby tree and something else chittering back. Twice I pointed out to Michael a bat soaring over our heads, black against a dark gray sky, flying towards the Botanic Gardens.

The ornate black gate was locked, fronted buy another patch of rosy light against the brick pavement and a few benches. If we looked over our shoulders, we could see red through the trees edging The Domain. The sun was rising behind the cranes across the bay.

A sign said the gate would open at 7:00, which did Michael no good. He would need to be starting back to the hotel by then. Michael paced, I sat down on a bench. A man in overalls pushing a cleaning cart passed by, Michael talked to him a moment, and the man shook his head and shrugged, then pointed towards a young park employee who’d just arrived in what looked like a golf cart. Michael hurried over to talk to him. By this time, I’d noticed a several other people, standing back out of the lit area as though they were waiting. They were carrying what I took to be a large cooler, as if they were planning a picnic.

Whatever Michael said to the park employee, it worked. He opened the gates and allowed us, and the people with the cooler, to follow his golf-cart in.

So we walked, quiet and a bit awed, looking from side to side at the trees and the brush, watching the dark slowly melt away into gray morning twilight. I pointed up at the bats, which were much more restless than they’d been the night before, grooming themselves, some of them quarreling as they hung in the trees, quite a few of them flying from tree to tree, apparentlysearching for a place to bed down for the day.

Michael looked down a path towards a clearing and noticed some people setting up something that looked like an enormous, very filmy volleyball net made with netting so thin they looked less like rope than spider webs.

They were about six people in their twenties and thirties, in jeans and t-shirts, all looking very serious. The young fellow holding one post of the net smiled at us. He had thick curly brown hair, a rather broad face, with slightly slanted large eyes, and an earring. “Well,” he said to Michael, “I know why we’re up at this hour. The question is, why are YOU up?”

“Are you catching bats?” I asked.

He didn’t like the word “bat,” and rather pointedly told us they were catching flying foxes.

“Why?” asked Michael.

The naturalist shrugged. “We want to convince them to move someplace else. They damage the trees after a while. They really shouldn’t be here.” He pointed up towards a tree laden with the Flying Foxes, its upper branches almost completely bare of leaves.

“Well, they’re part of the eco-system, right?” Michael said. “They do serve some natural purpose, don’t they?”

The naturalist nodded, obviously pleased and said that they did. They were fruit bats and carried seeds, improved diversity. But too many of them could be a problem.

“So they’re urban pests?” I asked.

Another word he didn’t like. “No,” he said firmly. “They’re not pests. But we do need them to move on.”

“Are too many of them only a problem in cities?” asked Michael.

“Too many of them anywhere can damage trees. They also can carry diseases that affect other animals, and in places where there are a lot of horses and cattle we’re a little worried that some of them could even pass on to humans who work with livestock. There was a case — very rare, mind you, but it happens — of a human fatality. But here, we’re mainly worried about the trees.”

There was a shout and we saw a bat flying straight towards the net. It plunged into the mesh, which captured it almost gently, giving at least ten feet before it actually stopped its flight. Suddenly everyone was very busy, lowering the net so four of them could close in and seize the struggling animal. “Female..young…” I heard someone saying .

“Come take a look,” one of them said, and we moved a little closer as they held the flying fox up just before putting her into a bag. A sleek dark reddish animal stared at us for a moment with large black eyes. She was no doubt frightened, but she didn’t look it — just very, very, alert.

Everyone was preoccupied now with the flying fox, and we walked on. As we strolled towards another part of the gardens, Michael pointed out what looked like a bicycle rack. It was festooned with bags, most of which were either twitching or writhing, other bats or maybe just other creatures that had been caught.