Travel Articles

There’s a place in Florida where bats and mosquitoes went to war – and the mosquitoes won.

This event may not be the most important war ever fought in Florida, but to one man it was. He bet on the bats and lost. And his dream of a flourishing resort in the Florida Keys flew away with the bats.

All that’s left of R.C. Perky’s dream is a 35-foot-high wooden structure on Sugarloaf Key. This structure was to be his ‘bat hotel’, where the bats would live while feasting on mosquitoes.

This place in Florida is so far off the beaten path that is U.S. Highway 1 that you’ll never see it if you whiz on by the only road that leads to it. And even though you know ‘it’s here somewhere’, you still may not find it.

(If you’re southbound on U.S. 1, turn right at Mile Marker 17 onto Bat Tower Road. You can go only in the daytime; you can’t go at night.)

Most maps of Sugarloaf Key still show the name Perky, and it’s hard to understand why because there’s nothing there except Mr. Perky’s ‘bat hotel’.

Not one other remnant of the resort he built – one with a casino and restaurant – exists.

To this day, nearly a century later, nobody has found a flaw in Perky’s thinking. After all, mosquitoes like people and bats like mosquitoes. So he reasoned that if he built his resort – and a ‘hotel’ for the bats as well – hordes of people would visit his mosquito-free resort.

Didn’t happen. The bats he imported flew away. And Perky went broke.

Why it didn’t happen in this place in Florida is a mystery. “Bat hotels” had worked many times in other parts of the country. Why not here? Was there a flaw in Perky’s design? Nope. It wasn’t that much different from ‘bat hotels’ that had been successful. Did he import the wrong kind of bats? We’ll never know.

If you’re curious and want to see for yourself, you probably don’t have to hurry to get to this place in Florida. Having withstood a fire and a multitude of hurricanes, Mr. Perky’s ‘bat hotel’ probably will still be there, hiding the answers to the mystery of why the mosquitoes in this place in Florida won their war with the bats.

By Gene Ingle

2009 Gene Ingle You may reprint this article on your site, blog, autoresponder, etc., so long as you leave all the links in place including the link to http://www.gipublications.com – and do not edit or modify the content.

Gene Ingle, an expert on places to see in Florida, is an award-winning writer-cartographer who has driven nearly a million miles in Florida researching places on maps you probably never heard of. This place in Florida is one of 213 featured in ‘The Famous Florida Trivia Game’ available at http://www.ebookserendipity.com – Test your knowledge. It’s fun and it’s free.