{"id":988087,"date":"2026-08-08T03:04:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T03:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/988087\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T03:04:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T03:04:20","slug":"this-bat-show-rivals-austin-and-san-antonio-sites-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/988087\/","title":{"rendered":"This bat show rivals Austin and San Antonio sites"},"content":{"rendered":"

Austin and San Antonio aren\u2019t the only places where animal lovers can get a front-row seat to one of nature\u2019s most spectacular shows \u2014 the emergence of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats<\/a> on their way to their aerial bug feasts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since 2004, a large colony of the tiny flying mammals have called the Rio Grande Valley<\/a> \u2014 and its freeways<\/a> \u2014 home. And for the last 14 years, Mission resident<\/a> Mindy Schroeder Brown has been their biggest fan, running a Facebook group called Mission Bats<\/a>, hosting\u00a0meetups at local parking lots, and making it her mission to educate Valley locals about the migratory bats.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love them! I never get tired of watching them,\u201d Schroeder Brown said when\u00a0MySA joined her impromptu group for an evening of bat-watching in late-July.<\/p>\n

More than 200 people gathered at the parking lot of a Boot Jack\u00a0westernwear store in Mission<\/a> just before sunset. It was the biggest group of people that Schroeder Brown said she\u2019s seen in her 14 years of hosting the\u00a0meetups. She quickly set about passing out coloring pages, cookies and custom \u201cMission Bats\u201d stickers to kids and kids-at-heart while members of the local Texas Master Naturalist chapter set up a table with bat books, life-sized cutouts of the various species of bats native to North America<\/a>, and binoculars for visitors to share.<\/p>\n

Schroeder Brown had an arsenal of bat facts at the ready. A Mexican free-tailed bat weighs about as much as two quarters. The Mission colony is made up of mothers and their young. Each mama bat has only one pup at a time. As many as 250,000 bats will call the Valley their temporary home as they complete their migration<\/a> to their wintering grounds in Mexico.<\/p>\n

As the sun sank lower along the horizon, all eyes were trained across the street where traffic hummed past along the Interstate-2 frontage road<\/a>, and higher up, along the overpass that spans North Conway Avenue. But it\u2019s not underneath the bridge\u2019s span where the bats roost. Instead, Schroeder Brown pointed onlookers to a dark line near the top of the wing walls \u2014 the cement walls that buttress the earthen embankments on either side of the overpass. It\u2019s an uneven, sooty black smear created by the bats\u2019 urine, she explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not under where the cars drive. A lot of people think that\u2019s where they are. They\u2019re in a tiny little crevice up at the top,\u201d Schroeder Brown said, holding her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart for emphasis.<\/p>\n

As the sun set, the bats began to let loose from their perches in waves, dropping toward the ground until the wind could catch underneath their webbed wings to provide the lift they needed to soar. It almost appeared choreographed as the bats emerged from one section of the freeway at a time and rose into the air together in a twisting, turning ribbon called a \u201ccauldron.\u201d Lined up along the edge of the frontage road, the crowd of people who had come at Schroeder Brown\u2019s jubilant Facebook invitation cheered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin and San Antonio aren\u2019t the only places where animal lovers can get a front-row seat to one…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":987962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,338585,37065,7202,7203,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-988087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-america","tag-mysasotx","tag-mysastaff","tag-san-antonio","tag-sanantonio","tag-texas","tag-tx","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117057674855676667","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/987962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}