Texas prison officials have a new plan for a warehouse that hosts a large bat colony

Nearly two decades after discovering a bat colony had taken over one of its warehouses, Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) officials are still searching for ways to lure the winged creatures to find a new home.

The colony resides in a vacant cotton warehouse owned by TDCJ and is across the street from the Huntsville Correctional Facility.

According to Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Huntsville colony has grown in size to between 750,000 and 1.25 million bats. These numbers put the colony just shy of its more famous brethren living below Kongresgaden 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 in storage since the 90s, but a fire in the early 2000s destroyed the interior and prompted TDCJ to condemn the building.

TDCJ officials learned the colony had grown exponentially when it sought to demolish 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 lure the bats to leave on their own or it can’t demolish the building. Demolition also raised concerns about where hundreds of thousands of bats would roost if the entire colony was suddenly thrown out of storage.

Texas Parks and Wildlife officials said the majority of the colony consists of a western subspecies known as Mexican free-tailed batswhere 10% of the colony consists 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 investigator Robert Arnold.

“Our new plan with the bat warehouse is to replace the roof. It will help make the structure a little bit more structurally sound,” said TDCJ Dir. of Communications, Amanda Hernandez. “Then we can slowly start to close off areas of the warehouse, so hopefully fewer bats will migrate back to it.”

In 2018, TDCJ officials hoped that more newly constructed bat houses would lure the colony out of storage. When we visited the site in October, the bat houses were still empty, and the area below the 17-foot-tall structures is now being used by TDCJ as an additional parking lot.

“Does TDCJ feel like it’s living on borrowed time as far as the warehouse’s structural integrity?” Arnold asked.

“I would say there are definitely some concerns about the structural integrity of the warehouse,” Hernandez said.

Since the last time KPRC 2 visited the area, a fence has been erected around the building to prevent people from walking on the sidewalk in front of the warehouse. TDCJ continues to work with several state agencies and Bat Conservation International on how to potentially find the colony a new address.

Bat Conservation International installs signs on the fence around the warehouse to tell bystanders about the benefits of having one large colony in their city.

Hernandez said work to replace the warehouse roof will begin this fall.