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AUSTIN — It’s not your average spot for nature watching. The canyon walls are brick, glass and concrete, some of it squeezed into the shapes of billowing sails or owl faces.

The crowd, however, doesn’t seem to mind being folded into this wildlife-urban interface, arriving steadily by bicycle, foot, kayak or tour boat about 30 minutes before sunset. I cannot remember visiting any other downtown arena where the miracles of the wild world are joined at the hip with so many bars, restaurants, parking spots and robotaxis.

“What time will they fly out?” is the question most often asked of our tour boat pilot, D.J. Cornwell. He has a polished answer after spending 15 years working this stretch of Lady Bird Lake. “It was 7:39 last night,” he says, “but wild animals keep their own schedules.”

Cornwell has a sparrow tattooed on the back of one hand, a mariners’ symbol of someone who has piloted boats for 5,000 miles. No, the company does not sell the “batman” T-shirt he is wearing, but Lone Star Riverboats does offer some stickers paying tribute to the insectivores that draw big crowds March through November.

Nuggets with wings

Lady Bird Lake was once called Town Lake, Cornwell says, but the name was changed to recognize the contributions to downtown Austin made by former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th president of the ����������ϼ� States. He was in office from 1963 to 1969, becoming president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

After leaving Washington, D.C., Lady Bird had an office in downtown Austin, and, according to Cornwell, she would look out her window at downtown. It did not resemble the pedestrian-friendly English gardens she had observed in London. So she gathered some friends and set out to make a change during the 1970s.

“They made 10 miles of very used hiking-biking trails,” Cornwell says, “and they planted all the trees around the lake.”

He says Lady Bird and her fellow nature advocates created parks and even rerouted Shoal Creek to keep it from dumping sediment into Lady Bird Lake.

Ironically, however, it was the reconstruction of the Congress Avenue Bridge, finished in 1980, that made this spot such a perfect bat habitat. Narrow grooves in the concrete on the underside of the bridge created ideal nursery habitat for bats, and Mexican free-tailed bats took full advantage.

Cornwell, general manager of Lone Star Riverboats, says the bats are about the size of a chicken nugget with a 7-inch wingspan. By themselves, a single bat may not attract much attention, but when 750,000 of them fly out at sunset, it is spectacular, and that’s in March before the population doubles during the summer. By mid-July, births increase the population to 1.5 million bats. The population migrates south during the winter.

This population is considered the largest urban bat colony in the world, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife. An estimated 140,000 people come to watch the bats annually. Lone Star Riverboats have a capacity of about 220, but the customers probably average about 150 each day during the March to November season. There are other boat companies offering bat viewing; if you have paddleboarding and kayaking skills those are for rent as well.

Bat advocacy

Lady Bird Johnson’s contributions to wildscaping range far and wide across America.

Her name adorns a park on Columbia Island near Washington, D.C.; the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, also in Austin; the Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Cherry Blossom Grove in Missouri, and 300 acres of Redwood National Park in California were designated the “Lady Bird Johnson Grove” by then-President Richard Nixon in 1969.

The internet will tell you that Lady Bird believed “Beauty is not a luxury, and the landscape has intrinsic value that cannot and should not be ignored or debased.”

If Lady Bird Johnson is the godmother of wildflowers and forests, Merlin D. Tuttle is the godfather of bats and bat ecology.

Tuttle has been studying and photographing bats around the world for more than 60 years. He moved to Austin in March of 1986, bringing with him Bat Conservation International, an organization dedicated to, you guessed it, protecting and appreciating bats. His expressed purpose was to protect the new and misunderstood Congress Avenue Bridge population.

As the population under the bridge grew, public opinion was negative about living so close to so many animals often believed to carry rabies and associated with blood-sucking vampires and Halloween. Tuttle developed techniques for making people realize bats are compatible neighbors. Step one was trying to understand why people fear bats (often due to sensationalized articles and headlines), and step two was explaining his intentions were to help people.

“I call it winning friends, not battles,” Tuttle states in an online video. “I believe that no matter how we may differ in our views of the environment, politics, or religion, we can still be friends.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that despite a lifetime of studying bats, he was never attacked by one and that a single bat can eat up to 1,000 insects in an hour. His approach resulted in the City of Austin accepting the Congress Avenue Bridge bats and, later, the millions of tourist dollars they attract. Now Tuttle is even honored annually on Merlin Tuttle Day, Aug. 26, which is his birthday.

Prior to moving to Austin, Tuttle was the curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin. Tuttle has always been fascinated by bats; his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Kansas was about the ecology of the gray bat. After retiring from Bat Conservation International, he formed Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation. The Merlin Tuttle organization offers a huge online photo archive of bats — bats flying, clouds of bats emerging from the famous bridge, bats in hand, and bats flying in close proximity to Tuttle himself. Check out the images at merlintuttle.org.

Bat Conservation International, the first organization Tuttle created, is still functioning, concentrating on preventing bat species from going extinct and addressing climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species and other issues. They are found at batcon.org.

Just in case you forget why you are visiting Lady Bird Lake, there is a massive sculpture of a bat, black as a moonless night. Wind-driven “Nightwing,” by Dale Whistler, has been rotating near the south end of the Congress Avenue Bridge since 1998. It has been honored as the city’s favorite public sculpture. It was commissioned by the Downtown Austin Alliance and it shows how people who disagree about the nature of bats can still be friends.