Photo: Peter Potrowl
Finding bats in Austin is remarkably organized.
You walk downtown at sunset, join several hundred other people beside Lady Bird Lake and wait beneath a bridge while tour boats maneuver into position. Kayakers gather on the water. Phones come out. Everybody looks expectantly at a large piece of concrete.
I had heard about the bat colony living beneath the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge, so I wandered down one evening to see them leave to hunt.
I wasn't the only one.
Hundreds of people had gathered on the bridge and along the paths beside Lady Bird Lake. Boats full of tourists waited on the water while kayakers paddled into position below. Around 140,000 people come to watch the bats each year. On this particular evening, a fair proportion of them appeared to have arrived before me.
I chatted with a couple who had flown in from Canada specifically to see the bats, then another couple visiting from Southeast Asia.
All this for a colony Austin once wanted to eradicate.
When the Congress Avenue Bridge was renovated in 1980, its new concrete box beams created something close to ideal accommodation for Mexican free-tailed bats. Large numbers began moving in soon afterward.
The beams left narrow crevices underneath, each roughly three-quarters of an inch to an inch and a half wide and around sixteen inches deep.
This might not sound generous, even by current housing standards, but it was almost perfect for a bat.
The crevices were dark and protected. The concrete absorbed heat from the road above, keeping the roost warm enough for females to raise their pups. The bats had found their cave. It just happened to have several lanes of traffic on the roof.
They noticed the opportunity and swung into action.
By the early 1980s, hundreds of thousands had moved in. Today, as many as 1.5 million may occupy the bridge during the season, including an estimated 750,000 pups. It is considered the largest urban bat colony in the world.
Austin was not initially pleased with the results of its accidental property development.
Newspaper headlines warned that bats had invaded the city. Residents feared rabies and attacks. Petitions called for the colony to be eradicated. Officials considered blocking the bridge crevices with nets until it was pointed out that more than a million evicted bats would not simply vanish. They would look for alternative accommodation nearby.
Probably without consulting a realtor.
The bridge had created ideal housing. The city had supplied the tenants. It was now considering making them homeless in its own neighborhood.
What followed became known as Austin's "bat scare".
At this point, Austin needed someone to swing into action. Batman was unavailable, so the job fell to Dr. Merlin Tuttle.
Tuttle, the founder of Bat Conservation International, began campaigning to save the colony and moved the organization to Austin in 1986. He spoke to the media, community groups and schoolchildren, trying to explain that the bats were neither a bloodthirsty swarm nor the advance party of something worse.
They were migratory mothers raising their young. They also flew out each night and ate large quantities of insects, including agricultural pests.
This was less dramatic than the headlines, but considerably more useful.
Slowly, attitudes began to change. Fear became curiosity. People started gathering to watch the nightly emergence. Visitors arrived from farther away. The colony that residents had once petitioned to destroy became one of the best-known sights in Austin.
The city had moved from proposed eradication to organized boat tours.
Standing among the crowd, it was difficult to imagine the panic that had once surrounded them. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: the first small shapes appearing beneath the bridge as the light began to fade.
Then they came.
At first there were only a few, darting out from the concrete and disappearing against the darkening sky. More followed, twisting above the water before heading away in search of food.
I tried to photograph them.
Blur.
Blur.
Slightly larger blur.
Photographing a small, fast-moving bat at dusk using a phone turned out to be less of a photographic exercise and more a way of collecting several pictures of the sky.
Eventually, I put the phone away and watched.
Without the screen between us, I could see them darting in and out, changing direction almost instantly as they spread out over the lake. Beneath them sat the boats and kayaks. Above them, traffic continued crossing the bridge that had accidentally given them a home.
Austin rebuilt a bridge, created a home for 1.5 million bats and panicked when they moved in.
Forty years later, people fly in from around the world because the bats stayed.
Have Fun, Go Wild!
Jack
