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:

    We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves ...
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    We never can tell how our lives may work to the account of the general good, and we are not wise enough to know if we have fulfilled our mission or not.
    —Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)

    I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.
    William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    Only in America ... do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles—and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.
    Philip Roth (b. 1933)

    Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)