Hola Guano In Austin there is this bridge downtown over the river that houses a few million bats. Bat expert types say that the design of this bridge just happened to be a design that was perfect for bats. The bats caught on and have been living there ever since.
Tuesday afternoon I walked under the bridge and I couldn't see the bats, but I could hear them squeaking away and could smell their lovely poop.
At sunset, they leave their bridge home and go out to chomp on insects. Bat-perts say the bats eat something like 8 million insects a night. If you're an insect in Austin, I'd retire as soon as the sun goes down. Actually, if you are an insect reading this, well, that is the coolest thing ever.
Watching the bats is supposed to be a fun thing to do in Austin town, so I headed down to the bridge to watch them. It was gorgeous evening with a real purty sunset and I walked to the middle of the bridge where I was able to watch some huge turtles in the water flopping around.
About 20 minutes after sunset, the bats started coming out like loonies - swirling all around under the bridge and then zooming out of town and making these little black clouds in the distance. The whole time you can hear their little radar clicking squeaking sounds.
It was neat.
There were a lot of bats. Enough bats to make your head hurt trying to imagine the numbers of them.
I had my camera, but no flash and it was getting dark so I may not have any photographic proof of this all - and this whole Austin thing could be a big lie and I have been hiding under my bed posting this via the home wireless machine. That would be funny.
