“A public opinion poll had just shown that bats ranked just below rattlesnakes and cockroaches on public opinion,” remembers Tuttle.īats were seen as little furry monsters that would suck your blood and get tangled in your hair. But it was a tough time to be a young bat scientist. studying bats and took a job in Wisconsin as the curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum. He’s been obsessed with bats since he was a teenager growing up in the Tennessee hill country, right next to a bat cave. Merlin Tuttle is the founder of Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation and one of the world’s most prominent bat scientists.
#Battman with bats cracked#
He was an ambitious young biologist who was looking for a chance to show the world not only that bats weren’t as scary and dangerous as they were cracked up to be, but that we could live harmoniously alongside them, right in the middle of a city. But someone was about to arrive in Austin and stick up for these bats-an advocate of sorts, in the court of public opinion. There were plans to remove, or even eradicate, the bats because people feared that they were a danger to human health and safety. The local newspaper the Austin American Statesman published headlines like “Bat Colony Sinks Teeth Into City and the New York Daily News went with “Mass Fear in the Air as Bats Invade Austin.” As the colony continued to grow, so did the hysteria. Initially, the people of Austin were not happy about their new neighbors of the night. And shortly after the bridge renovation, the engineers realized that the spacing between the beams was the perfect size for bats… and they realized this because hundreds of thousands of bats had already moved in. And they’re looking for caves or old barns or some other protected spot where they can safely hang upside down. Photo by Stuart Seeger (CC BY 2.0)Įvery year around March, Mexican free-tailed bats (or Brazilian free-tailed bats as they’re also known) migrate from Mexico to Central Texas. Bloschock and the other engineers decided that the gap should be somewhere between ¾ of an inch and an inch and a half, which didn’t seem like a particularly meaningful decision… until the bats moved in. It needed to be rebuilt with more contemporary beams called “box beams.” The box beams sit below the road’s surface, and they needed to be spaced a certain distance apart. The bridge was a simple concrete arch bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s, he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress Avenue Bridge.
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