DAVAO CITY—The Chinese mid-autumn festival, including a night fun run in this city, would be dedicated to educating and popularizing conservation of bats. Norma Monfort, founder of Monfort Bat Cave and Conservation Foundation Inc. said, she has linked up with private groups, Rotary Club of South Davao and the Davao City Chinatown Development Council, to tap the Chinese celebration of the mid-autumn Mooncake Festival to renew her bid to accord the “rightful appreciation of the bats, especially the fruit bats, in environmental protection.”
“Now that Davao City has been known to be the country’s fruit capital, and annually celebrates the bountiful fruit harvests during the Kadayawan Festival in August, I believe that the fruit bats should now also get their rightful recognition for making this happen because they are the main pollinators of the fruits,” she said.
She titled the new promotions campaign, “Elevated battitude,” and would be launched on September 26 with the Chinese community “in an unprecedented opportunity together to tell the world about bats in the way they are perceived in the Chinese Culture.”
An events organizing unit, Titans Run Management Team, would also hold the Mooncake Festival Night Run for Peace, Love and Awareness, with 3-kilometer and 7-km leg, and with prizes and certificates for the Peace Republic and State of Awareness Golden Seeds of Peace awards to the top finishers. Monfort said there would also be signing of a Manifesto 2000 for bat conservation.
The Monfort bat caves are found inside the Monfort estate in Barangay Tambo, outside the district of Babak in the Island Garden City of Samal.
The caves have received the prestigious listing in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2010 for hosting to more than 2 million fruit bats, or Rousetteus amplexicaudatusan, a number described as having the largest concentration of the fruit bats. Monfort established the foundation in 2007.