It’s Bat Week, so we’re remembering the Sugarloaf Bat Tower
It’s Bat Week – an international celebration designed to raise awareness and promote conservation efforts for bats.
In the Keys, we like bats because they eat mosquitoes. And we were, for almost 100 years, home to a special monument that was intended as an early method of mosquito control.
The Bat Tower was on Sugarloaf Key, near mile marker 17. It was built in 1929 by Richter Clyde Perky, who was developing a resort there. He heard about a Texas scientist who had developed bat roosts and sent an employee to Texas for the plans.
The base was 12-by-12 feet and the tower was 30 feet, narrowing as it went up. “It looks like a windmill without blades,” according to a UPI story from 1987.
The scientist who designed the tower supplied the bait for $500 a box. But no bats ever appeared.
Nonetheless, the tower survived as a local attraction and was restored by the Good family, owners of the Sugarloaf Lodge. It was even immortalized in Thomas McGuane’s 1984 novel “The Bushwhacked Piano.”
The Keys moved on in the 1950s to more aggressive mosquito control methods, creating a Mosquito Control District with an elected board that persists to this day. The Sugarloaf Bat Tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But Category 4 Hurricane Irma destroyed it in 2017.
Fortunately, it lives on in local lore – and in images from our online image archive.
