Bats At Last!

Bats are streaming into the darkening Texas sky and David Bamberger is ecstatic. The tens of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats - perhaps as many as 200,000 - are finally fulfilling an ambitious dream. Bamberger, a founder of the Church's Chicken chain, spent $170,000 on an artificial cave that was designed and built specifically for bats. The bats waited five years to show up.

In all the world, there is nothing like the cave Bamberger built on his 5,500-acre ranch, a remarkable 30-year experiment in large-scale wildlife habitat restoration west of Austin, Texas. Completed in early 1998, the cave sits gently in a wooded canyon. All but the entrance is covered with soil and native vegetation.

Bamberger calls his bat cave the “Chiroptorium,” which combines chiroptera (bats' taxonomic order) and auditorium. He says he became enchanted with bats after visiting BCI's Bracken Cave near San Antonio 15 years ago and watching the stunning emergence of 20 million Mexican free-tails.

He worked with Bat Conservation International Founder Merlin Tuttle and other BCI staffers to develop the idea and consulted experts around the world as the grand notion began to take shape.

The cave covers 3,000 square feet with two domes. Twenty tons of steel reinforcing rod supports 300 cubic yards of gunite (the concrete used for swimming pools). Bat biologists came to view this bat-conservation marvel. And the media came from around the world to describe it. The Chiroptorium was ignored, it seemed, only by the bats.

Only a few thousand ever roosted there, Bamberger said. “The bottom line is that Mother Nature is going to decide whether they are going to come or not. But I've been waiting all this time.”

And then, one evening in mid-August this past summer, “I drove up here and … my God, they were just pouring out! It's like a mini-Bracken.”

He's not at all sure where they came from. But he is absolutely delighted they have come at long last. “Vindication feels very good,” he says. “I wanted to demonstrate that a manmade habitat can mitigate manmade damage. Then other minds can come up with other solutions” to help different species.

The full story of David Bamberger's bat cave and the bats that have finally moved in will be in the Fall Issue of BATS, the magazine for BCI members.

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