Austin Bats Under Congress Bridge
Though we see bat images around Austin, many Austinites have yet to experience among one of the most amazing sights that happens along among our busiest streets yearly from March to November.
Beneath the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge lives the largest urban bat swarm in North America. When they emerge at night during "bat season," it resembles a cloud flying toward the eastern.
There are numerous places where you can see the team of bats. The Austin-American Statesman park on the southeast side of the South Congress Bridge is complimentary as well as open to the general public. There is likewise standing room along the pathway of the bridge itself. One more way to see the bats as well as the city is to take a boat flight on Woman Bird Lake.
The support framework of the South Congress Bridge, such as the buttresses, pylons, arches and blog posts, are original to the 1910 construction. When the roadway was rebuilt in 1980, designers consisted of small voids running along the length of the bridge's base.
Totally by accident, this brought in the bats that already lived in the drains pipes underneath the north side of the bridge. They reprise their houses in the cracks, where they have the ability to stack on top of each various other. Their populace increased and also reached optimum capability in just 3 years.
Now the north end of the bridge is taken into consideration Austin Bat Watching Tours the "baby room," since this is where the mothers stash their children. After they go on their every night search for food, they return to the north end of the bridge and also search for their dogs by noise and fragrance, which can take 2-20 minutes. Once they registered nurse their babies, the mommies take shelter a little bit additional along the bridge.
The cloud of bats everyone intends to catch sight of is the "initial shift" of bats leaving the spaces of the bridge to quest for flying bugs such as mosquitos as well as moths. This initial wave flies out right prior to sunset, and also it can take 2-3 hours for every one of the bats to find out.
Throughout the gestational period in April-- May, the mommy bats are extremely hungry so there are a great deal of good evenings to catch the 750,000 bats leaving. They all give birth in the very same 2-week window in very early June, which causes them to leave later on in the night and also lowers our opportunity to see them. In late July/early August the nursing period is finishing and the children start flying by themselves. This is thought about "peak period," because the whole population of 1.5 million flies bent on search.
The bats do continue to fly out every evening, however some evenings they are extremely hard to see. By the very first week of November, the bats have actually begun to move, it is starting to obtain cold as well as there is reduced exposure.
Every early morning, the bats return to the bridge concerning 30 minutes prior to sunrise. They are out for around 7-8 hrs. They hunt on their own, and also it is not as huge of a phenomenon when they come back considering that they do not return in waves.