A few weeks ago, Beth E. Concepcion’s piece about bats roosting between two buildings on Broughton Street caught my attention, but I largely forgot about the piece until this evening.
From Broughton Street buildings serve as home sweet home to bats:
At dusk, the bats take to the skies. Hundreds of them spill out of their roost between 220 and 218 W. Broughton St. and head out in search of the evening meal of insects.
Well, let me tell you, there aren’t hundreds of bats — there are thousands.
Now, this isn’t anything like watching the bats at Carlsbad — one of the natural wonders I’ve been lucky to witness — and the splatterings of guano at the sidewalk’s edge are nothing like the tons deposited in some caves.
But the departure of the bats is pretty impressive, all the way around.
Concepcion’s article indicates that when the young bats are able to fly — probably sometime soon — the roosting area will be sealed off while the protected species is out en masse for the night.
I was down on Broughton this evening to get some information for my Sunday City Talk column and was reminded about the bats.
I got to the buildings a little before dusk. From the sidewalk, you can hear the bats squeaking and tittering as they awaken.
And then soon one bat came, and then a flood.
They continued to fly out for almost exactly 30 minutes according to my iPhone. I’m just estimating based on some attempts to count clusters really fast, but for at least 10 minutes I’d say they were 200 or more coming out per minute. That’s a really conservative guess.
With all the rain we’ve had this year, it’s surely been a great year for many types of bugs.
And so too, I’m assuming, a really great year for bats.
OK, maybe I should have shot this horizontally, but I was trying to include the entire vertical seam from which the bats poured.
Another bystander and I felt a couple of drops of “rain” — so that’s my voice concluding it was bat shit. I wasn’t even considering that the audio would be picked up. What do you want? I’m an amateur iPhone videographer.
I’d suggest clicking in the corner to take this full screen for the full effect. It’s 90 seconds long.
Enjoy: