Congress Avenue Historic District - Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge

Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge

The Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge over Lady Bird Lake houses the world's largest urban bat population. When the bridge was refurbished in the 1980s, the new design created crevices underneath the structure that happened to be ideal for bats to roost in. In the summer, the colony has up to 1.5 million Mexican Free-tailed Bats. The bats can be seen emerging by the thousands from under the bridge every evening throughout the summer, before they migrate to Mexico for the winter.

Read more about this topic:  Congress Avenue Historic District

Famous quotes containing the words ann, richards, congress, avenue and/or bridge:

    It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    ...some sort of false logic has crept into our schools, for the people whom I have seen doing housework or cooking know nothing of botany or chemistry, and the people who know botany and chemistry do not cook or sweep. The conclusion seems to be, if one knows chemistry she must not cook or do housework.
    —Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)

    I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.
    Gore Vidal (b. 1925)

    Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
    —E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)

    London Bridge is broken down,
    Dance o’er my lady lee,
    London Bridge is broken down,
    With a gay lady.
    How shall we build it up again?
    Dance o’er my lady lee,
    —Unknown. London Bridge (l. 1–6)