AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas freeze this February killed plenty of plants and trees. In Austin, the Public Works department initially estimated as much as 90% of palm trees died because of the cold and storms.
"We could say, roughly, there may be 14,000 or 15,000 palm trees in the greater Austin area, and again, I'm a little bit more optimistic that maybe not up to 90% did not die," Lisa Killander, an arborist and project manager with Austin Public Works said. "I'm thinking now it's going to be less than that."
The freeze also killed thousands of bats in Austin. Austin Bat Refuge founders Lee Mackenzie and Dianne Odegard said they saw at least 4,000 bats fall from under bridges after thawing out. They estimate only 1,200 of them were alive and able to be taken to the refuge's flight cage for rehabilitation. Of those, only about 600 survived. Even fewer are able to get back into the wild again. Odegard is still watching over them in what she calls her "field hospital."
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"These bats, though, are solitary," Odegard said of yellow bats. "They're not colonial, like the Mexican free-tail bats under the bridge. They mainly roost by themselves."
Yellow bats are not so easy to spot. They typically find a place to sleep under palm fronds – the same palm fronds hanging from the trees that died in the storms.
"You could spend hours looking under there and there could be many undiscovered yellow bats hiding in that palm frond," Mackenzie said. "You would never know until you see them flying around in there just after dark."
The City is set to remove all the dead palm trees over the next few months. Killander said the plan is to cut down the trees to stumps.
"They actually have rather extensive root systems and there's no need to rip all that up and go to all that trouble," Killander said. "It will decay pretty quickly over time. So that's what we'll do. We won't be felling them like lumberjacks. They won't be just falling. It'll be cutting the fronds down and then chopping them bit by bit."
As the city prepares to remove the palm trees, Austin Bat Refuge contacted Public Works about the bat habitats. Now, the two are working together.
"When we do have to take down a palm in the public right-of-way, we're going to try to take those fronds down one at a time and check for bats," Killander said.
"We were able to convey our concerns and suggestions for how they might safeguard the yellow bats when they were doing tree work that just couldn't be avoided," Mackenzie said.
Not every palm tree is owned by the City of Austin, though. Many palm trees on private property died too. Odegard and Mackenzie hope homeowners take the same advice.
"Palms can be selectively pruned to remove the freeze damage while maintaining the skirt that has been forming over years and that provides critical habitat for as many as six of our local bat species," Austin Bat Refuge lists on its website. "The new freeze damage has an unruly appearance, like windblown or frizzy hair, and we contend that those fronds can be removed (if absolutely necessary) while leaving the skirt (and its valuable habitat) intact."
Austin Public Works has started assessing the number of trees dead from the freeze, but will not have a cost estimate on the project until later this spring or even early summer.
"We're not going to wait too long into the summer to remove dead palms because they are a grass; they are not a tree at all," Killander said. "They will start to decay and get kind of soft and become more dangerous to remove."
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