The Ladies and the Bats

Linda Burton posting from Austin, Texas – Aw shucks, I’m going to miss the bats. Austin is famous for its music, its food, and a really odd thing that has always puzzled me. Part of Austin’s cultural identity is caught up in bats. And I don’t mean baseball bats, I mean the kind that fly around at night eating insects. The story goes like this: the Ann W Richards Congress Avenue Bridge (named after the 45^th governor of the state of Texas), which crosses over Lady Bird Lake (named after the former First Lady of the United States and created by the Longhorn Dam on the Colorado River) is home to a large urban bat colony. These bats, on their nightly flying and eating quest, attract about 100,000 tourists annually and impact the city economically to the tune of $8 million a year. There are a million bats living under Ann Richard’s bridge over Lady Bird’s lake; which means there are more bats than people in Austin. It’s a spectacular sight, I’m told; gather on the bridge, or in boats, or on either side of the river just about dusk to watch. But alas, they haven’t come back to Austin from their winter vacation in Mexico yet; mid-March is a typical arrival time. Since I won’t get to see the little critters, I researched a few Bat Facts. » read more