Until a few years ago, the Florida Keys was home to a peculiar landmark: a shingled tower rising above the foliage behind the Sugarloaf Lodge. Tall and weather-beaten, it was a strange monument to an innovative idea that didn't pan out. Locals called it the Bat Tower because that’s what it was built for. In 1929, while much of America was dealing with bank failures and the Great Depression, Richter Perky faced a problem far less earth-shattering but more immediately irritating: mosquitoes. Perky was the largest landowner in the Keys at that time, and his pet project was the Sugarloaf Lodge — a fishing retreat for wealthy tourists. It had a marina, a restaurant, and several guest cottages, but it also had an enormous number of mosquitoes. In fact, there were so many mosquitoes that if an unsuspecting guest put his hand against a screen, the other side of the screen would immediately display a black handprint made of the hungry insects. Obviously, the annoying pests meant Perky’s enclave wasn’t an ideal setup for tourism, no matter how good the fishing. Not a man to let something like that slow him down, Perky read all he could about how to get rid of the annoying insects. He quickly discovered the importance of bats to control mosquitoes and the parasites they carried. It wasn’t long before Perky had constructed a 30-foot-high tower in a quiet area and left it unpainted — apparently bats prefer unpainted buildings. The cost of building the bat tower was $10,000, but it was wasted money. It turns out that bats are hard to transplant from one location to another, so Perky developed a secret “bat bait” made of bat guano and the ground-up sex organs of female bats. The bats were supposed to be irresistibly drawn to the bait, adopt the tower as their home, and leave it each night to devour mosquitoes for dinner. Unfortunately, things didn’t exactly work out that way. The bats came alright, but they flew away almost instantly, never to return. Today, the bat tower is gone, and the job of eradicating mosquitoes has been left to the Keys’ Mosquito Control Team.
