Congress Avenue Bridge bat emergence
— the river turning to smoke at sundown.
Not only on a wall.
Congress Avenue Bridge bat emergence, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Each evening from spring through fall, the underside of the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge releases the largest urban bat colony in North America. Roughly 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats live in the expansion joints of the 1980 rebuild, drawn by gaps the engineers did not plan for. They come out in a long, ribboning column that crosses the river and bends east toward the fields, and the crowd on the bridge and the lawn at Statesman Park goes quiet without being asked. The air smells of the lake and the warm road. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge carries Congress Avenue over Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin, connecting the Capitol corridor to South Congress. The current bridge was completed in 1980 on the alignment of an 1869 crossing. When engineers rebuilt the deck, the expansion joints on the underside formed long, narrow crevices about an inch wide, which Mexican free-tailed bats found suitable for roosting. The colony grew through the 1980s. Today it is estimated at roughly 1.5 million bats from late March through early November, the largest urban bat colony in North America, managed in cooperation with Bat Conservation International, headquartered in Austin.
The bats are Mexican free-tailed (Tadarida brasiliensis), the species also found at Bracken Cave northeast of San Antonio. They fly out to hunt corn earworm moths and other agricultural pests over the Blackland Prairie east of the city, eating roughly ten to twenty thousand pounds of insects on a summer night. Emergence begins shortly before sunset and can continue for forty-five minutes when the colony is at peak size in August. The column rises out of the joints in a long ribbon and bends downwind, visible from the bridge deck, the Statesman bat-viewing lawn, and from kayaks on Lady Bird Lake below.
The colony is migratory. The first females arrive from central Mexico in mid to late March; numbers peak in early August when the year's pups are flying alongside the adults; the bats depart by early November. The best viewing window runs late July through mid-September, when the column is largest and the sun sets between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. local time. The City of Austin and Bat Conservation International publish nightly emergence forecasts during the season. Cool fronts, heavy rain, and unusually low temperatures can delay or suppress the emergence on any given evening.
