Bats of Austin, TX

Bats of Austin, TX, originally uploaded by Talke Photography.

Casa Kenwood Guesthouses is less than a mile's walk from the famous Congress Avenue Bridge, which is home to the largest urban colony of bats in the United States. It's a pretty cool tourist attraction, as nightly (especially during the warm summer months) people line the pedestrian sidewalk to watch the up to 1.5 million bats take flight at sunset to chow down on 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of mosquitoes and other insects each night. (Some nights Casa Kenwood Guesthouses is right in the "bat path", and we see their little bat highway directly above us!)

The Congress Avenue Bridge was initially constructed in 1980, and at the time the bridge engineers had no idea they were constucting the ideal bat environment. At first people feared the bats and wanted to eradicate them, but eventually cooler heads prevailed and Austin began to love our bats (think of all the mosquitoes we'd have without them!), and erected a huge bat sculpture as an homage.

The bats arrive in Mid-March and then leave for Mexico in November (they're Mexican Free-Tail Bats), and the mostly female population give birth to pups who start to emerge nightly with their mothers in August.

If you're a visitor to Austin in the coming months, make sure you take a stroll down the Congress Avenue Bridge at sunset and witness their amazing emergence (seen in this photo).