One Million Bats: Austin's Uncommon Nightlife
25. Jun, 2009 
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Compared to the North or the West, Texas smells. It’s not an unpleasant odor, but it’s unmistakeable: wafting up from the springy earth, a mix of decay and new life. A fertile smell, fecund: the smell of a marshland barely contained. Which, of course, Austin is.
The warm night air, as the evening winds pick up, carries that marshy smell from one end of town to the other. Nights in Austin are vibrant, balmy, full of noise and activity. And so as the sun fades and the unbearable day-heat lifts, the night chorus begins: cicadas, crickets, frogs, mosquitos, gnats, chiggers, snakes, mice, rats, roaches, skunks, coons, cats and dogs all venture out into the dusk to feed. And with them come the bats.
Yes, bats! Austin, as it turns out, is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony. Inside the Congress Avenue Bridge (non-Austinites: the bridge crosses the Colorado River and is smack in the middle of town) lives a colony of Mexican Free-Tailed Bats, 1.5 million strong at its annual peak in September. The bats migrate to Mexico in winter, but spend the rest of the year tucked up under Congress Avenue: every night from mid-March to November, you can count on a spectacle as they take to the sky in search of food.
Since this nightly show is free of charge, you can also count on having some company while you wait for the exodus. I joined Trey, Nina, and a bunch of family groups on a grassy knoll. Above us, hundreds of people lined the railing of the bridge; many more sat in boats on the river. Everyone was patient and quiet: watching the pigeons, thinking about the bats, waiting for the sun to drop.
And drop it did behind the high-rise hotels, and suddenly the pigeons’ cooing was drowned out by an upswell of squeaking. For those who’ve never heard bats: they sound a lot like mice, and if you saw one up close it’d look like a mouse with big wings and ears1. They’re clumsy flyers, with big heavy wings giving them uneven motion through the air, and they travel in swarms for safety. They live in swarms too: massive colonies in enclosed, dark spaces. Such as the crevices of the Congress Street Bridge.
Looking at the bridge in the daytime, you’d have no idea it was filled with bats. Even as the sun set, there was no indication of anything out of the ordinary. One minute there were no bats, and the next there were thousands. It was just dark enough that you could barely see them: flying out from the bridge’s underside, they created a twisting column of dark, squeaky blobs which rose up past the treeline and then dispersed into the night. There were bugs everywhere: plenty of bat food to be had. Therefore, plenty of bats. The stream of bodies seemed endless. It didn’t thin out for ten, fifteen minutes: fifty thousand bats? A hundred thousand? A million? If I’d had to venture a guess, I’d have said I saw a million bats. And according to tourist information on the colony, that would be just about right.
A bit of history: this colony moved into the bridge when it was reconstructed in 1980. Austinites were freaked out at first: rabies! Vampire bats! Creepy gross creatures aargh! But Bat Conservation International stepped up with a public education campaign, reminding people that Mexican Free-Tailed Bats don’t attack mammals, that vampire bats live far far away, that most people with rabies get it from their dog, and that this colony consumes 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects every night.
Recognizing that they’d rather have bats than mosquitos, Austinites calmed down and eventually embraced their bat brethren: in the 29 years since the bridge was built, not a single bat attack has been reported, and now the Congress Avenue colony is a great big tourist attraction. As it should be.
My photos don’t do the bats justice, but here’s a dreadfully cheesy video with some excellent footage. Enjoy.
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