Congress Avenue Bridge is a maternity colony, and summer is baby bat season! Female bats give birth to one pup each year, typically in early June. Newborn pups are hairless and are a quarter of their mother’s weight–imagine a human bearing a 30-pound baby! Mothers leave the pups under the bridge while they hunt.  When they return from hunting, each mother finds her own pup, among thousands,  by voice and scent. Bat pups learn to fly when they are about four to five weeks old.

Follow a few simple rules to keep the colony safe while you watch them take flight: 

• Do not shine white lights on the emerging bats. Keep your cellphone or other flashlights turned off.
• Keep the noise level down within 100 feet of the bridge; no clapping, yelling, or instruments.
• No flying drones. Collisions kill bats and disable drones.
• Never capture or handle a bat.
• Visit AustinBats.org for more viewing tips and history.

In the Austin area, call Austin Bat Refuge. They rescue and rehabilitate bats and will walk you through how to respond to a found bat.

512-695-4116

512-799-8847

Stay calm and never touch a bat with bare hands. Left alone, a bat poses no risk; when handled, it may bite in self-defense. Call right away if it’s injured, in a trap or water, on the ground with a pup, or within reach of kids or pets.

If a person or pet may have been bitten, call local animal control first. In Austin, call 3-1-1.

Full guidance: austinbatrefuge.org/found-a-bat.

No, you should not be worried, but caution should be taken whenever people encounter wild animals. 

If someone has been bitten or scratched, get medical attention and have the bat tested by the health department.

Bats have a history of being blamed and feared without foundation. Exaggerated warnings have real consequences: colonies get destroyed by people acting on fear.

A lot. Free-tailed bats across Central Texas eat ~200 tons of insects on an average summer night. The Congress Avenue colony alone eats up to seven tons of insects in a night, and individual bats will travel a hundred miles or more to find enough bugs to eat.

Their preferred prey reads like a farmer’s worst list: corn earworm moths, armyworm moths, cucumber beetles. They also eat mosquitoes. Intercepting migrating moths in spring means the eggs never reach the crop – a single bat can prevent more than 20,000 eggs from being laid in one night.

The estimated saving to Texas farmers alone is around $1.4 billion each summer, largely in pesticides that never have to be sprayed. Before oil, guano mined from the bat caves was the state’s largest mineral export. Microbes from those guano ecosystems are still being studied for waste detoxification and biofuel production.

Bats have huge, positive environmental impacts. Bats around the world control pests, pollinate plants like agave and durian, and disperse the seeds that naturally regrow tropical forest – all after dark.

Bat colonies across the U.S. are facing multiple pressures right now: 

• colony destruction deliberately out of fear
• wind turbines killing an estimated three million bats a year in the United States
• white-nose syndrome among hibernating species
• habitat and roost loss
• disturbance at cave sites

 The first step to helping bats is to become an educated advocate:

• Talk about bats accurately. People will protect what they understand.
• Habitat aid: leave dead and hollow trees standing where safe, and leave the palm skirts.
• Speak up on wind and development decisions locally.
• Support the people and organizations who support bats: Austin Bat Refuge, Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation, Bat Conservation International
• Bring someone to the bridge at sunset – show people the magic of Austin’s bat colony