Almost two decades after realizing a bat colony had taken over one of its warehouses, officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) are still searching for ways to entice the winged creatures into finding a new home.
The colony lives in a vacant cotton warehouse owned by TDCJ and is across the street from the Huntsville prison unit.
According to Texas Parks and Wildlife, The Huntsville colony has grown in size to between 750,000 and 1.25 million bats. Those numbers put the colony just shy of its more famous brethren living under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, which is a colony estimated to have 1.5 million bats.
KPRC 2 Investigates reported on this colony in 2018.
Bats have been roosting in the warehouse since the 90′s, but a fire in the early 2000s gutted the inside and caused TDCJ to condemn the building.
TDCJ officials learned the colony had grown exponentially when it tried to tear down the building in 2009, citing structural concerns.
Bats are protected in their natural habitats, and in 1995, then-Gov. George W. Bush signed a resolution designating the Mexican free-tailed bat as the official flying mammal of Texas.
Since the warehouse is considered the colony’s natural habitat, TDCJ has to entice the bats to leave on their own or it can’t demolish the building. Demolition also brought up the concern of where hundreds of thousands of bats would roost if the entire colony was suddenly evicted from the warehouse.
Texas Parks and Wildlife officials said the majority of the colony is comprised of a western subspecies known as Mexican free-tailed bats, with 10% of the colony made up of an eastern subspecies. The Mexican free-tailed bats migrate every winter, while their eastern cousins stay put.
“I was here in 2018, and in 2018, they said, ‘We’ve been working on this since ‘09′. Here we are in 2024, what’s the plan?” asked KPRC 2 Investigates Robert Arnold.
“Our new plan with the bat warehouse is to replace the roof. That will help make the structure a little bit more structurally sound,” said TDCJ Dir. of Communications, Amanda Hernandez. “Then we can slowly start closing off areas of the warehouse, so hopefully, fewer bats will migrate back to it.”
In 2018, TDCJ officials hoped several newly built bat houses would lure the colony out of the warehouse. When we visited the site in October, the bat houses were still empty and the area below the 17-foot-high structures is now being used by TDCJ as an extra parking lot.
“Does TDCJ feel like it’s living on borrowed time as far as the structural integrity of that warehouse?” asked Arnold.
“I would say that there’s there’s definitely some concerns about the structural integrity of the warehouse,” said Hernandez.
Since the last time KPRC 2 visited the area, a fence has been installed around the building to prevent people from walking on the sidewalk in front of the warehouse. TDCJ continues working with several state agencies and Bat Conservation International on how to potentially find the colony a new address.
Bat Conservation International is installing signs on the fencing around the warehouse to let onlookers know about the benefits of having a large colony in their city.
Hernandez said the work to replace the warehouse roof will begin this fall.
