Did you know that the The Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin is the spring and summer home to some 750,000 bats with up to 1.5 million bats at the peak of the bat-watching season? It's the largest urban bat colony in North America! Each evening around sunset, the Congress Avenue bats emerge like a black cloud from the crevices of the bridge. Covering the countryside in search of food, it is estimated that the bats consume from 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects. You can take a boat out onto the river to watch the bats fly at sunset which will cost you , but you can just as easily see them from the banks of the river for free like we did where people gather nightly to watch them. At twilight, just before the it gets completely dark, millions of bats fly out in what looks like plumes of smoke in a line just like you see in cartoons. It's a once in a lifetime I guarantee you will never see anywhere else. It lasts for about 15 -20 minutes after which…do what we did and go have a nice dinner…
