"All the conveniences any little bat heart could possibly desire"
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Perky's Bat Tower stands at the end of an unmarked dirt road on Sugarloaf Key as a striking, albeit unsuccessful, monument to both biological pest control and cross-species design.
Before the Florida Keys meant sun, sea, and Jimmy Buffet, they were famous for mosquitoes -- dense, black clouds of them that hummed and bit without pause, spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever, and drove visitors temporarily insane with irritation.
In the late 19thcentury, the Broward Palm Beach New Times reported swarms "so dense in some areas that it was impossible to breathe without inhaling mouthfuls of mosquitoes." A twentieth-century entomologist caught a terrifying--and record-breaking --"365,696 mosquitoes in one trap in one night" on an island just off the tip of the Florida peninsula, according to Michael Grunwald's book, The Swamp.
And, in the 1920s, hordes of mosquitoes were the major obstacle standing between Richter Clyde Perky, a real estate developer from Denver, and the success of his fishing resort on Lower Sugarloaf Key. The construction manager Perky had hired to oversee the project complained that "in the late afternoon, you would just have to
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In his search for a solution, Perky came across a book called Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars by Dr. Charles Campbell. A doctor and "city bacteriologist" based in San Antonio, Texas, Campbell had been experimenting with attracting bats to artificial roosts since the turn of the century, in the belief that they were the natural predators of mosquitoes. As an article in BATS magazine explains, Campbell initially thought that the design of bat architecture would be a simple matter:
"Can bats like bees be colonized and made to multiply where we want them?" he wondered. "This would be no feat at all!...Don't they just live in any old ramshackle building? They would be only too glad to have a little home such as we provide for our song birds..."
After a handful of expensive failures, followed by several months spent in the caves of West Texas, observing bats in their natural environment, Campbell came up with his pioneering design for a Malaria-Eradicating Guano Producing Bat Roost, "built according to plans furnished by the greatest and only infallible of all architects, Nature," and equipped with "all the conveniences any little bat heart could possibly desire."
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His new tower, claimed as the world's first successful intentional artificial bat roost, was built next to Mitchell's Lake, ten miles south of San Antonio, in spring 1911. Malaria cases in the neighborhood decreased, Campbell cleared hundreds of dollars in guano sales, and the Mitchell's Lake tower was soon followed by more than a dozen more built to the same design, one as far afield as Italy.
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Perky obtained the roost plans from Campbell in 1929, and constructed his own tower at a cost of $10,000. More than thirty feet tall, and sturdy enough to have weathered dozens of hurricanes over the past eighty years, the tower still features a louvered bat entrance facing the prevailing wind, a central guano removal chute, and a dense, honeycombed walls of cypress wood bat corrugation that function as roosting shelves.
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Sadly, despite a lavish application of pheromone-doused guano as bait, not a single bat ever moved into in the palatial accommodations Perky had provided. (In fact, the first scientifically confirmed colony of bats in the Keys was only found in 1996.)
Today, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District regards Perky's Bat Tower as their founding monument, but relies instead on a full-time team of seventy-one employees armed with handheld foggers, spray trucks, four helicopters, and two fixed-wing aircraft from which to dispense regular doses of larvicide granules and pesticide sprays onto the landscape. They are currentlycontemplating a not uncontroversial return to biological control with the purchase and release of genetically-modified mosquitoes, whose offspring die upon hatching.
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Meanwhile, Perky's tower is finally home to a winged animal. Standing in a pool of stagnant, mosquito-friendly water, the weathered pine pyramid is currently topped with an active osprey nest--architecture by animals atop architecture for animals.
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This post was originally published at Venue.com.Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
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