OK, first of all you have to understand that in Texas we say “goin'.” If you say “going,” everyone will know immediately that you’re not from Texas. Anyway, we really are goin’ batty here in Texas and we’re surprisingly proud of it! Here in the beautiful Texas Hill Country we have a profusion of primarily Mexican free-tailed bats that arrive from south of the border every summer to deliver their young. It’s a girl thing, and the colonies of moms that raise their “pups” leave the dads behind in Mexico to do whatever dads do when the family is away.
The Congress Street Bridge colony in Austin is (I assume) world famous. Numbering up to an estimated 2-4 million bats, the only mammal that flies emerges every evening from under the bridge and wows thousands of spectators as they follow the course of the Colorado River like a dark cloud, off to their nightly hunt.
Pursuing the bat trail in Central Texas can lead you through some incredibly beautiful country. A few miles east of Fredericksburg, the Grapetown Road leads to an abandoned railroad tunnel where another couple of million bats raise their young and emerge into the night sky to hunt for their favorite meal, the corn earworm moth and the cotton bollworm moth. These furry little creatures eat so many of those moths each night that Texas farmers save many thousands of dollars in pesticide use every summer and, needless to say, all those pesticides never enter the environment.
As a birding enthusiast, I was recently treated to an evening at the famous Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve, where the world’s only known cave built specifically as a chiroptorium exists. Approximately 60,000 bats are using this cave as a nursery, and the emergence is as spectacular as anywhere else.
The most breathtaking emergence we witnessed this year was at Bracken Cave. This is a natural limestone cave close to San Antonio and is open by invitation only. The cave is owned by Bat Conservation International and the group hopes to fund the building of a visitor center and observatory. Now, the stunning part: it’s estimated that 20-40 million bats occupy the cave over the summer. To say that witnessing the phenomenon of this emergence is anything less than stunning is an understatement. This is the largest colony of bats in the world; in fact, the largest concentration of any mammal in the world. One of the monitors said he watched from 7:30 p.m.-1:00 a.m. one evening and the bats were still pouring out when he left. It’s really an incomprehensible number of anything, let alone something so active and vital.
Bat emergences are, of course, common and locally known in many areas of the world. What’s really amazing is when you are shown a radar map that documents the incredible density of this phenomenon. They ride the thermals to an altitude of 10,000 feet and are tracked by radar at the San Antonio airport so they can route incoming air traffic safely. Texas has truly embraced the bat craze. Even Austin’s hockey team is named the “Ice Bats.”So what is it that draws thousands of quiet, almost silent spectators each year? This much-maligned and even feared animal is harmless (unless you’re a moth). And this phantom-like, almost mystical creature has captured our imaginations and hearts. We never really get a good look at them. Their flight is spastic and erratic and, at best, they appear as a swift silhouette against the sky or an immense gray/black smoke trail heading off on the hunt. Perhaps it’s our deeper understanding that the phenomenon of emergence has taken place for eons and is one of those timeless events that give us reason to reflect on our own place in the scheme of things. Then again, maybe we are thrilled by the spectacle simply because it’s so cool! It could be that’s all there is to it.
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