There is a place just north of San Antonio in which only those that dare to venture into the dark underworld of the bats venture to …. (eerie music enters).  Actually, there is nothing dark about it, because you can’t go down into the bat cave where approximately 60 feet of guano is piled from thousands of years of bat excrement building.  It is a toxic environment where only flesh-eating beetles can survive to live off the unfortunate bats that fall to their deaths.

How can anything that sounds so disgusting be so fascinating?  The beauty comes in the spiraling of the 20 million bats that emerge at dusk during the summer and early fall months in Bracken, Texas from the Bracken Bat Cave.  You can only travel to this specially preserved place by becoming members or being invited by a member of Bat Conservation International (http://www.batcon.org/).

Our family made such a trek, recently, to discover, first hand the amazing beauty of these millions of bats as they surface from the cave and spiral out in noisy chirping and wing-flapping sounds. It is definitely not for those who have a fear of bats.  There are so many that at times you could reach up and grab one or look up and see more bats than sky.

The Bracken Bat Cave is the mother-load of bats.  It is home to a maternal colony of Mexican Free-Tail Bats that are about 20 MILLION strong!  About 4-5 million bats come out each hour.  It is the largest bat colony of any species in the world.

This video, made by my oldest, Leilani, from her IPhone and edited by myself, only touches on the experience.  To be there in person is in a small way comparable to seeing the Grand Canyon: pictures and video can’t fully record the in-person sensory experience.  Hope you enjoy it.