Austin and San Antonio aren’t the only places where animal lovers can get a front-row seat to one of nature’s most spectacular shows — the emergence of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats on their way to their aerial bug feasts.
Since 2004, a large colony of the tiny flying mammals have called the Rio Grande Valley — and its freeways — home. And for the last 14 years, Mission resident Mindy Schroeder Brown has been their biggest fan, running a Facebook group called Mission Bats, hosting meetups at local parking lots, and making it her mission to educate Valley locals about the migratory bats.
“I love them! I never get tired of watching them,” Schroeder Brown said when MySA joined her impromptu group for an evening of bat-watching in late-July.
More than 200 people gathered at the parking lot of a Boot Jack westernwear store in Mission just before sunset. It was the biggest group of people that Schroeder Brown said she’s seen in her 14 years of hosting the meetups. She quickly set about passing out coloring pages, cookies and custom “Mission Bats” 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, and binoculars for visitors to share.
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 to their wintering grounds in Mexico.
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, and higher up, along the overpass that spans North Conway Avenue. But it’s not underneath the bridge’s span where the bats roost. Instead, Schroeder Brown pointed onlookers to a dark line near the top of the wing walls — the cement walls that buttress the earthen embankments on either side of the overpass. It’s an uneven, sooty black smear created by the bats’ urine, she explained.
“They’re not under where the cars drive. A lot of people think that’s where they are. They’re in a tiny little crevice up at the top,” Schroeder Brown said, holding her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart for emphasis…