The Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin fairly teems with life. The concrete span is, unintentionally, a world-class bat house, a summertime nursery where hundreds of thousands of baby Mexican free-tailed bats are born, nursed and taught by their mothers to fly and wreak havoc on night-flying insects.
With both mothers and pups, the bridge hosts roughly 1.5 million bats - America's largest urban bat colony.
All day, they sleep tucked into the inch-wide expansion joints on the bottom of the bridge. But each evening around sundown, hungry bats come streaming out.
They form dense, black columns that snake across the sky as the free-tails begin their nightlong hunt for food. By the time they return to the bridge at dawn, the bats will have eaten 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of bugs.
The evening emergences are dramatic sights that draw tens of thousands of locals and visitors to the bridge each summer. The Austin American-Statesman provides parking for bat-watchers (after 6 p.m.) at its bridgeside offices.
Austin reveres its bats. A statue celebrates them, and the local hockey team is named the Ice Bats. The city even calls itself “The Bat Capital of America.” But it was not always so.
Austin's bats once suffered from the same myths, misperceptions and groundless fears that still plague bats around the world. Consider this newspaper headline from a decade and a half ago: “Mass fear in the air as bats invade Austin.” Many Austinites were in a panic and the city was moving toward eradication. That was the situation when Bat Conservation International moved its headquarters to Austin in 1986.
BCI launched an aggressive education campaign. Its staff talked with news media, met with city officials and spoke to community groups and schoolchildren. The stubborn fear that bats attack people and cause disease was shown to be a gross exaggeration: In 20 years of Austin bat watching, no one has been attacked by a bat or contracted a disease from one.
So now, from about mid-March to October, crowds of bat fans gather just before sundown to watch the dramatic emergence of the bats of the Congress Avenue Bridge. Viewing is best during August, after the young bats join their mothers on the nightly insect hunt.
