Ever try to fix a problem and it doesn’t work? Well, in the 1920s Richter Clyde Perky, the largest landowner in the Florida Keys, tried to do just that when it came to marsh mosquitoes. Supposedly there were so many of them back then that an entomologist caught a record-breaking 365,696 mosquitoes in one trap in one night. Um…that’s a lot. So in 1929 Perky dreamed up a way to get rid of the pesky insects by building a 30-foot-high unpainted bat tower down an unmarked dirt road in a quiet area of Sugarloaf Key. Believe it or not, bats cannot easily be relocated from one home to another so it was stocked with special bait, a mixture of bat guano with ground-up female bat sex organs. But unfortunately the bats never took to Perky’s tower. They simply flew off and never returned (or according to some, never migrated to begin with). But the tower survives, and today the bat tower is a beloved local landmark (while the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District does what the tower failed to do). You can say Perky was “batty” for building a useless tower, but at least he tried to do something to control the mosquito population. I probably would have just sat in a lawn chair complaining about the heat and the bugs. “Can’t somebody do something?”
Bat Tower
