Qualla: Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower

Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The plan was elegant in its simplicity: build a tower, fill it with bats, and let the bats eat the mosquitoes. Richter Clyde Perky, a real estate developer from Denver who had sunk his fortune into a fishing lodge on Lower Sugarloaf Key, was desperate. The mosquitoes in the Florida Keys were legendary, thick enough that his construction manager complained you had to rake the bugs off your arms in the late afternoon. Perky's lodge was beautiful, waterfront, positioned to attract wealthy fishing enthusiasts. But no one wants to fish in a cloud of mosquitoes. So in 1929, Perky purchased plans from Charles Campbell of Texas, an early pioneer of bat studies, and spent $10,000 to construct a Hygiostatic Bat Roost on his property. He coated the interior with bat guano laced with pheromones to attract the bats. Then he waited. The bats never came.

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower: A Man, a Lodge, and a Plague of Mosquitoes

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Averette at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. Richter Clyde Perky was not a man who did things halfway. He had come to the Florida Keys from Denver with a vision: a handsome waterfront resort on Lower Sugarloaf Key, positioned at mile marker 17 along what would become U.S. Route 1, catering to sport fishermen drawn by the ta...

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Image: Averette at en.wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower: The Tower That Bats Refused

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The tower Perky built was a tapered, 30-foot-tall structure of pine and cypress, with louvered openings facing the prevailing wind, a central shaft for guano removal, and dense honeycombed walls of cypress bat corrugation that served as roosting shelves. It was, by Campbell's sta...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower: Eighty-Eight Years of Standing Empty

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower outlasted its builder, his lodge, and the original road that ran past it. It became a roadside curiosity, one of those strange Florida landmarks that travelers stopped to photograph without quite understanding what they were looking at. On May 13, 1982...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower: Hurricane Irma and the Fall

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. On September 10, 2017, Hurricane Irma's devastating winds toppled the Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower. After 88 years of standing against tropical storms, salt air, and the general entropy of the Florida Keys, the empty roost finally fell. The tower had survived without bats, without a p...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0