Waiting in the Wings: Bats Showing Up in Fort Worth, Texas

Jul. 21–FORT WORTH — Residential living in downtown Fort Worth is attracting all kinds.

Some find the views and night life appealing. Some like walking to work. Then there are others attracted to old buildings, parking garages and the wealth of tasty insects.

They’re the other downtown mammal: Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana, the state’s official flying mammal, otherwise known as the Mexican free-tailed bat.

“They’re occupying older buildings everywhere,” said Amanda Lollar, founder and president of Bat World Sanctuary in Mineral Wells. “It’s common. Most of the time, no one knows they’re there.”

Occasionally people find out, as the occupants and owners of the Kress Building did in May, when they discovered that a bachelor colony of 3,000 bats had been quietly cohabiting with them.

Life would have continued peacefully for everyone were it not for an unsuspecting contractor who screwed a sheet of plywood over the incinerator shaft on the building’s roof.

Frantic bats sought escape however they could, flying into the Hyena’s Comedy Club on Main Street, the Fox & Hound pub on Houston Street and an underground electrical vault where bigger mammals — rats — had a field day.

Bat experts who participated in a four-day rescue effort were stunned by the colony’s size. They said it led them to believe that there may be more than just the small colonies they know live in parking garages.

“When I was on top of the Kress Building, I got to noticing all the buildings around there,” said Wayne Peplinski of Lake Worth, who led the rescue effort for Bat World. “Some of them are very old. Some have missing windows. I sure would like to investigate some of those buildings.”

Mexican free-tailed bats, the variety that live in the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, are a vastly misunderstood animal, according to bat lovers.

Rabies is extremely rare in bats, they say, far less common than in raccoons, for instance. And bats certainly aren’t a nuisance like grackles. Their most important contribution to society is their appetite.

They are voracious eaters of mosquitoes and other insects, flying up to 40 miles every night in the summer to hunt. Peplinski estimates that the Kress Building colony alone could consume 25 pounds of insects a night.

“Most people downtown aren’t aware there are so many bats around,” he said. “It’s good for the bats in one way. But people also don’t realize how we benefit from them.”

Charles Hamm, attorney for the owner of the Kress Building, Nicholas Rose, said he thinks that more building owners should know about bat colonies and ways to humanely deal with them before renovation starts.

“We wanted it done the safest way,” Hamm said. “We didn’t want anyone exterminating them, so that’s why we called the Bat World people.”

It’s certainly the first time that Andrew Taft, president of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., had heard of any bat populations.

“I have never had this conversation before,” he said.

If bats become as common an issue for building owners as lead paint and asbestos abatement, Taft said, he’d consider passing the news on to the organization’s members.

But he figures that the Kress Building situation is unusual. And, he said, continued redevelopment of buildings leaves fewer places for bats to roost.

“The trends point to a major bat habitat loss in downtown,” he said, jokingly.

But the Kress Building, a 1936 art deco structure between Houston and Main streets, wasn’t vacant. The bats, the experts said, appeared to spend their days in a space between the exterior and interior walls.

Renovation had started on the upper floor of the building, which is why the incinerator shaft was blocked, Hamm said.

A few days after the shaft was closed, Hamm’s office called Bat World, telling the group’s volunteers that bats were flying into the pub and comedy club. Peplinski expected to find a few bats, as he does the 100 or so other times a year he answers calls about bats.

But it quickly became obvious that the bats’ presence at the pub and comedy club was the least of it. For four days, a team of volunteers worked almost round-the-clock, pulling dead and weak bats out of the building’s elevator shaft, basement and subbasement.

They estimated that the bats had been trapped a week.

“They had eye infections, respiratory infections,” said Dottie Hyatt, a volunteer from Keller. “They were dehydrated. We had to suck debris out of their nostrils and mouths.”

Peplinski referred to it as the “Kress mess.” Someone else dubbed it “the nightmare on Houston Street.”

When the volunteers’ work was done, 1,800 bats had died, and 1,200 had been rescued, cleaned up and given antibiotics.

Bat World volunteers had hoped the building owner or contractor would make a donation to help cover the $2,500 in expenses they said they incurred. Hamm and Rose said they would make a donation, but that hasn’t happened yet, Hyatt and Lollar said.

The surviving bats now make their home in downtown Mineral Wells, in a 106-year-old stone building owned by Bat World.

They’re eating country bugs now.

“Fort Worth’s loss was Mineral Wells’ gain,” Hyatt said.

FACTS TO BAT AROUND:

–Mexican free-tailed bats love to eat mosquitoes and other insects. A single bat can devour thousands of insects in one night of dining.

–The bats can fly 30 to 40 miles per night to feed.

–They make their nightly appearance in downtown Fort Worth at about 8:50.

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Copyright (c) 2005, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

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