One of the things Susan wanted to see in Austin was the Congress Avenue Bridge Bats.<\/p>\n

Congress Avenue is a street in Austin. There’s a bridge on that street (the Congress Avenue Bridge). Under said bridge are hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats — somewhere between 750,000 and 1.5 million bats, depending on the season (the bats migrate and are in Austin from spring until fall). At dusk, all of the bats fly out from underneath the bridge to go eat. If you are standing near the bridge near dusk, you will see a lot of bats.<\/p>\n

From what we read and could tell there are three optimal places to view the bats. You can stand on top of the bridge on the sidewalk and watch the bats fly out from underneath the bridge. You can sit on the grassy area next to the water below and watch the bats fly over you. You can also get on a small boat and watch the bats up above from the water. Any time you are under bats I assume you are in a “bat pooping zone” so we opted to watch the bats from above.<\/p>\n

It is recommended that you arrive an hour before dusk in order to get a good spot on the bridge. We attempted to arrive an hour early but the traffic and parking set us back 30 minutes. We were able to stand in the second row on the sidewalk. I am bad at estimating crowd sizes but I would say there were somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people waiting around to see the bats.<\/p>\n

For 30 minutes, we waited for the bats to wake up. Mason shouted “bat!” a few times and pointed at planes flying overhead. Eventually, one bat did fly out. Then a second bat flew out. Then a third. Then, this happened.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What looked like smoke billowing out from underneath the bridge turned out to be hundreds of thousands of bats. While a few bats swarmed the nearby trees and dined on mosquitoes, most of them flew together in formation, making a huge, thick line of bats circling the skyline.<\/p>\n

Here is a picture I stole from the internet showing the bats from below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While they say it can take up to 45 minutes for all the bats to exit the bridge, we stood and watched them for about 15 minutes before heading back to the car. I can’t think of anything else to say about watching bats fly out from under a bridge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things Susan wanted to see in Austin was the Congress Avenue Bridge Bats. Congress Avenue is a street in Austin. There’s a bridge on that street (the Congress Avenue Bridge). Under said bridge are hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats — somewhere between 750,000 and 1.5 million bats, depending on the season (the bats migrate and are in Austin from spring until fall). At dusk, all of the bats fly out from underneath the bridge to go eat. If you are standing near the bridge near dusk, you will see a lot of bats. From what… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}