Holy smokes, Batman! Why should hipper-than-thou Austin get all the attention when it comes to those little Halloween-lovin’ bloodsuckers? Houston has its own colony of about 250,000 Mexican free-tailed bats that emerge nightly from the Waugh Street bridge wearing tiny sombreros, and you can experience the Dracula-like swarm during the Waugh Bridge Bat Colony Pontoon Boat Tour. Watching the mammals take flight is a different experience from the water, so even if you’ve seen the mass exodus from the bridge, you’ll see something new on this tour. During the 90-minute pontoon boat tour along Buffalo Bayou, you’ll also learn the answers to such aching questions as how bats sleep, what they contribute to the ecosystem and how much they can eat in an hour-which, pound-for-pound, is way more than even your porky Uncle Jimmy. (And they produce way less smelly pull-my-finger gas.) If you miss today’s tour, there’s another scheduled for Halloween. The boat sails 45 minutes before dusk. Allen’s Landing, 1000 Commerce. For information, call 713-752-0314, ext. 4 or visit www.buffalobayou.org. $20 to $35.
Fri., Oct. 24; Fri., Oct. 31, 2008
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.
