The Congress Avenue Bridge is one of several Central Texas bridges where Brazilian free-tailed bats have taken up residence. “These bats can cross four to five counties in just 12 to 15 minutes.” “These guys fly thousands of feet high at night, and they catch tailwinds and can actually travel nearly 100 miles an hour,” Tuttle said. They can travel 90 miles in a single night and fly at greater heights than any other bat species. “The problem is people are afraid of what they don’t understand, and I came down and showed them what the bats are about, and next thing we knew, this was becoming a huge, international tourist attraction.”īrazilian free-tailed bats form larger colonies than any other mammal in the world, with as many as 10 to 20 million in a single colony. “There was panic and pandemonium,” Tuttle said. Tuttle worked to educate the people of Austin about the advantages of its bat colony. Citizens began signing petitions to wipe out their furry, new neighbors. The public’s bat phobia was fueled by negative press and ill-informed health officials, who suggested that the bats were rabid and dangerous. Tuttle moved to Austin to found Bat Conservation International in the 1980s – a time when there was widespread apprehension about the Congress Bridge bats. This peaceful coexistence between bats and the citizens of Austin is the realization of a long-held dream for Merlin Tuttle.
TEXAS OVERPASS ROCK FREE
The bat flights have become one of the city’s most popular sources of free entertainment. The sun heats the pavement on top of the bridge and then filters down into the gaps, warming the pups.Īt sundown, swarms of mature bats take flight from the bridge almost simultaneously as they begin an overnight journey in search of food. The crevices protect bats from predators and provide female bats with an incubator-like setting to raise their young. When the Texas Department of Transportation remodeled the Congress Avenue Bridge, it left deep, narrow crevices between the beams that turned out to be the perfect bat habitat.
Spectators gather on the Congress Avenue Bridge as more than a million Brazilian free-tailed bats take flight over Austin. The species has been migrating to this region from its overwintering sites in Mexico since long before a city was established here, but a bridge-building mistake in 1980 provided the bats with their current urban home.
Hundreds of people gather in the Texas capital every day at sunset to watch an estimated 1.5 million Brazilian free-tailed bats emerge from the Congress Avenue Bridge. From February to November, Austin goes batty.
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