Airbnb.com/h/palms-pines-cacti

10/14/2026

10/06/2026

Every evening from spring through fall, close to a million and a half bats pour out from under a bridge in downtown Austin, and people stand on the sidewalk to watch it happen. 🦇

They are Mexican free tailed bats, and the colony under the Congress Avenue Bridge is the largest urban bat colony in North America. Nobody invited them. When the bridge was rebuilt in 1980, the new deck happened to have long narrow crevices underneath that are almost exactly the right width for a bat to wedge into, dark and warm and safe from anything that would eat it. Word got around. Within a few years there were hundreds of thousands of them down there.

The city's first reaction was not delight. There were calls to get rid of them and a general feeling that something had gone badly wrong. 🌆 Then the research came in. The colony eats somewhere between ten and twenty thousand pounds of insects on a summer night, much of it moths that would otherwise be laying eggs in Texas cotton and corn. The bats were running free pest control on an industrial scale. Austin changed its mind completely, and now the nightly emergence is one of the first things people take visitors to see.

If you have stood on that bridge at dusk you know the strange part. 🌙 You do not see them first. You hear a sound like wind moving through dry leaves, and then the column lifts out from under your feet and keeps going for twenty minutes.

Have you watched it, and did it go the way you expected?

09/29/2026

A little bit of everything for everyone… that’s the Esther's Follies show way 💪🏼🤩

Lucky for you we have a special price for this weekend’ shows— use code LIMITED.EDITION at check out for tier 2 and tier 3 seats = $20 tickets! 🎟️ esthersfollies.com has all the info. 🤓

What’s your favorite part of the Follies show? Start your night out right, see you soon! ✨🍿🥰

09/28/2026

09/27/2026

Right about now, a couple million bats are coming home. 🦇

The Mexican free tailed bat is the official state flying mammal of Texas, and the colony living under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin is the largest urban bat colony in North America. Something like a million and a half of them pack into the narrow expansion joints under that bridge in the warm months. Every evening they pour out in a long ribbon and people line the rails to watch. What almost nobody sees is the other half of the trip, the return at first light, when the ribbon comes back the opposite direction and folds itself into the concrete.

They spend the whole night eating, and a colony that size goes through an enormous volume of insects. That is a real and deeply unglamorous gift to Texas farmers, especially cotton growers, since the moths whose caterpillars chew up a cotton crop are exactly what the bats are out there hunting. It is one of the few cases where the spooky thing in the dark is quietly working in your favor. 🌅

Plenty of Texans have watched them come out at least once. Very few have ever been up early enough to watch them come back.