Gone Batty

I'm not sure how I feel about bats... generally I think they're pretty awesome. They eat bugs - A single bat can eat up to 1,200 mosquitoes in one hour! They fly in formation. And they have an acute sense of hearing because they use echolocation to find out where stuff is. Because of these reasons, I wouldn't mind if a bat or two wanted to hang out around my house. They could be my batty little pets. I think Lola would even like them.

eeee... I'm so cute! Let me be your pet!!

But on the other hand, bats are kinda disgusting... Some of them drink blood... gross. Also, some of them have rabies, super nasty. So, I'm on the fence about bats.


Meeeeaahhhh... I want a blood smoothie!!

So remembering my love/hate relationship with bats, I decided to visit a bat phenomenon when I was in Austin Texas last weekend. See the thing is, there are TONS of bats that live under this one bridge in Austin. Out of all of the bridges, they decided to make their home under the Congress Street bridge... no other bridge, just that one. There aren't any stragglers under the bridge next door... nope no bat step children that decided to run away... They're all under that ONE BRIDGE. Here's the deal, they get hungry at night time, and they go looking for food.... little insect snacks. But they go ALL AT THE SAME TIME. All of them... like thousands of them. Word on the street was they fly out around sunset, but I yelped it (I'm doing that now) and I read that the bats aren't really tied to that schedule exactly. So even though sunset was around 7:45pm, Malibu Ken and I headed to the bridge around 7:00.

Follow the bat signs

Just in case the big crowd didn't clue you in, there's bats up ahead

This is the bridge the bats live under. It's all about location with these bats. They had to pick the heart of the city (that's the capital building up ahead)

The crowd is for the bats

The sun was setting...

Here came the tour boats...

These people are about to get bat poop on them...

But the birds knew what up...

They all flew over into the tree so when the bats came out, then wouldn't be in the way. Plus they probably didn't want to get pooped on.

Then we waited... and waited... and waited...

These freaking bats were taking FOR-EV-ER

But around 8:15pm... Then they decided to come out!! In huge bat packs!! They all just started flying out looking for bat snacks. One weird tid bit... It smelled... Kind of like ammonia... That's not really a founded remark but that's what it smelled like to me. Like the smell of  bat BO.



It was kind of tough to get good pictures of the bats, but Malibu Ken did a good job of capturing them as much as possible.

Bat closeup.

Overall, the experience was bat-tastic. But I would recommend showing up a little later, like right at sunset. One thing we didn't end up doing was go to the TRIO bar at the Four Seasons right across from the bridge on the north side of the river. There was a dock down by the bar where you could enjoy your Bat-tini, a drink the bar created just to celebrate the bats. We were so full from dinner, we decided to pass on the bat-tini. Does anyone out there have any batty stories or secret bat viewing locations?

Peace, Love, and bat poop
Engineeringirl