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ONCE A WITCH'S BIRD

© Joy Butler

If you dare venture out when an October moon disappears behind clouds, and all weird souls and screeching tomcats lurk among shadows, you may be suddenly visited by a fluttering black thing swooping past your head and disappearing just as quickly into the deep purple darkness. Although harmless, this thing, in the Middle Ages, would have been called a "witch's bird". Today, in Texas, it would probably not be a bird at all, but a Mexican free-tailed bat.

Texas boasts, both the largest colony of mammals on earth, which is 40 million bats living in Bracken Cave near San Antonio, and the largest urban colonization of bats on the continent where 1.5 million bats call the Congress Avenue Bridge over Town Lake in Austin their summer home. There are many other free-tail bats living in trees, old buildings, and barns throughout Texas, including the 10 million in the Frio Bat Cave south of Concan and the roost of 600,000 underneath the I-35 overpass in Round Rock. It is estimated that approximately 95 to 104 million migrate each March during their 7 to 15 year lifetime from Mexico, and bear their young in June. Each mother births only one baby and nurses her hairless, flightless "pup" until it is old enough to leave the roost and forage for food, which is usually around the end of August. When November temperatures drop, the pups are mature enough to migrate with the colony back to the warmer climate of Mexico.

These colonies leave the roost nightly, to find food and can be seen billowing from beneath the Austin bridge like a huge black train into a dusky horizon. This swarm is so massive it actually shows up on the National Weather Service radar in nearby New Braunfels. The bat pups are left deposited on the roost ceiling and when the mother returns, she calls to her baby among the thousands and it calls back to her. Amazingly, by their unique voices and scents they find and nurse only their own.

All summer long, hundreds of Austin residents and visitors gather around Congress Avenue Bridge just before dark to watch this nightly show. Austin has embraced these flying mammals as a city attraction and "bat cruises" are offered on the lake, and area hotels and restaurants cater to bat watchers. The local hockey team call themselves the Ice Bats, and Hill Country Brewing and Bottling now brews a beer named Bat's Breath Bock. At the corner of Barton Springs Road and Congress Avenue, a 20 foot wide aluminum bat sculpture turns in the breeze.

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