Austin Bats Website



Though we see bat imagery all over Austin, many Austinites have yet to experience among the most incredible sights that happens along among our busiest streets every year from March to November.

Below the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge lives the biggest urban bat swarm in The United States and Canada. When they emerge in the evening throughout "bat season," it's like a cloud flying towards the east.

There are several areas where you can see the group of bats. The Austin-American Statesman park on the southeast side of the South Congress Bridge is free and also available to the public. There is additionally standing space along the sidewalk of the bridge itself. An additional way to see the bats and also the city is to take a watercraft ride on Girl Bird Lake.

The support structure of the South Congress Bridge, such as the buttresses, pylons, arcs and blog posts, are initial to the 1910 construction. When the roadway was reconstructed in 1980, engineers consisted of little gaps leaving the length of the bridge's base.

Totally by accident, this brought in the bats that already inhabited the drains pipes underneath the north side of the bridge. They reprise their houses in the cracks, where they are able to stack on top of each various other. Their Public Bat Watching and Sunset Tour populace increased and also reached optimum capability in just 3 years.

Now the north end of the bridge is taken into consideration the "nursery," since this is where the moms stash their babies. After they take place their nightly quest for food, they return to the north end of the bridge and also search for their pups by noise and aroma, which can take 2-20 minutes. Once they registered nurse their infants, the mothers nestle a bit additional along the bridge.

The cloud of bats everyone wants to catch sight of is the "initial shift" of bats leaving the spaces of the bridge to quest for flying bugs such as insects as well as moths. This first wave flies out right before sundown, as well as it can take 2-3 hrs for all of the bats to come out.

Throughout the gestational period in April-- May, the mom bats are very starving so there are a lot of great evenings to catch the 750,000 bats leaving. They all give birth in the very same 2-week window in very early June, which triggers them to leave later on in the night and also reduces our opportunity to see them. In late July/early August the nursing period is finishing and the children start flying by themselves. This is considered "peak period," since the whole population of 1.5 million flies out to quest.

The bats do continue to fly out each and every single night, yet some nights they are really challenging to see. By the initial week of November, the bats have started to migrate, it is beginning to get chilly and also there is low presence.

Every morning, the bats go back to the bridge about half an hour before sunup. They are out for around 7-8 hours. They quest by themselves, as well as it is not as big of a spectacle when they return because they do not return in waves.

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