So on Sunday night we went out to see the Waugh Bridge Bat Colony in downtown Houston. Who would have ever thought there were 250,000 Mexican free-tailed bats living under this bridge? By passing by you'd never know it... that is, unless you had your window down and could smell all of that terrible bat guana. Eek! So the story goes that this particular bridge was built with a type of expansion joint that is just the right size for these bats to live in, and that's why they're there and not under any other bridges. We went there at 8pm, about 20 minutes before official sunset. There are a couple different places you can watch the bats from, and we were able to stand at the observation deck and wait. For awhile not much happened. You could see a few bats flying underneath the bridge, but nothing else. Then slowly you start to notice that more and more are dropping down and that they're whirling around and creating a vortex. And then, by some signal unknown to me, they all start shooting out horizontally and flying down Buffalo Bayou (see first post to see what Houstonians refer to as a "bayou") and into the nearby trees and brush looking for their dinner. We were actually expecting something more spectacular of the kind where all at once thousands of bats would fly up into the air creating almost a black sheet and that it would all be over in a matter of minutes. Instead, they flew out sideways and even after 10 minutes were still flying out! We took numerous pictures, none of which turned out since it was so dark. It was cool, and believe it or not, I also read a post by a guy who said that he'd been picking up the Waugh bats on his weather radar. Ha!While there, we heard about the bat colony in Austin, TX which boasts 1.5 MILLION bats! Now that is something we're definitely going to have to go and check out.
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