Trials & Tribulations of Seeking New Tunes

So, the past few weeks I have been on a crusade to find some new music. My multi-tiered approach includes catching up on Sound Opinions episodes, listening to KEXP song-of-the-day downloads, and asking friends what they are digging at the moment. I heard a song by the band Fruit Bats and liked it okay. I went onto emusic to see if they had an album that I could listen to snippets of and perhaps purchase.

I enter "Fruit Bats" into the search and got a hit for the artist, so I check it out. I notice the album title is in French, and translates to African Savana. I didn't think the band was international, but whatever. I click play and hear ambient sound -- very Flaming Lips, but a band isn't jumping in. . .

Oh wait.

This is a recording of the sounds of the wildlife in the African Savana. Fruit Bats are indeed performing on this album, but as a species not as a band.

Shopping and Guano and Bats, Oh My!

San Antonio is known as a tourist destination and not just for humans. Every year an estimated 100-million Mexican free-tail bats visit Central Texas to raise their young. 1.5 million take up residency on Congress St. Bridge in Austin, which is the largest urban bat colony in the world. 20-million of these bats set up camp in Bracken Cave just 20 miles north of San Antone, making it the largest known bat colony in the world!

Now for all you math whizzes out there, 20 million bats + 1.5 million bats still falls well short of the total 100 million bats who visit Texas. The rest of the bats find favorite haunts in other caves, bridges, and apparently the North Star Mall Parking Garage (Macy's end if you must know).

I stopped by the mall after work one day for an event at Lush (just the most amazing bath products ever) so I was in the parking garage at 6ish. I suddenly realized that the swooping all around me was not birds, but bats. I had a wonderful Batman Begins moment of Zen standing amongst all the bats. Some flew close enough that I felt the whoosh of wings.

Slightly less glamorous is the smell of guano in the parking garage. Guano has a very particular smell and the dog days of summer have ripened this smell to quite the strong olfactory experience.

After my mall-meets-super-hero experience, I googled to find more batty info. I learned that the newest section of the San Antonio Riverwalk, the Museum Reach, actually has a bachelor colony of 8,000 bats. Bat Conservation International has a wealth of really groovy bat factoids. Who wouldn't want to know that our bats consume about 1,000 tons of insects nightly?! However, I found zero mention of the size of the fashionista bat colony at the mall.