Congress Avenue Bridge Bats, 1
Monday, May 28th, 2007Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife
Austin, known for its music scene, is known for its bats! The downtown Congress Avenue Bridge is a hot-spot for bats and bat-watchers.
It’s mainly Mexican Free-tail bats under the bridge because this is a maternity colony. In other words, these are females that are going to have their babies under there.
Barbara French is a Biologist and Science Officer for Bat Conservation International. Bat-watchers congregate near the bridge to watch bat’s nightly emergence. French says
some months are better than other for bat-watching.
Most of the young are going to be born in June. August is tremendous. August is a great time because then all of the young are flying. You know, most of them are independent. You can see wonderful flights out of the bridge in August, even September. Then after that it becomes a little more unpredictable as the weather changes and we move into the fall. There’s an estimated one and a half million bats flying out of the bridge. So it’s an amazing site. It really is an amazing thing to watch.
Austinites take pride in these unique residents.
Today, it’s neat to see that teachers are teaching about bats. People are becoming a lot more bat savvy, particularly in Austin because of the Congress Avenue Bridge bats.
Details about the Congress Bats can be found on the Cat Conservation International website at www.batcon.org.
Tomorrow, the history of Austin’s bats.
That’s our show for today…For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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