PERKY SW BASE

After a morning of exploring the Key Deer Refuge, our next stop was the famous Bat Tower on Sugarloaf Key. We initially learned about this tower a few weeks ago when searching for information about the Central Park Bolt, oddly enough. We came upon a slideshow about “The 25 Best Nerd Road Trips”; one of the slides showed the bolt. As nerds who like finding weird things on trips, we paged through the rest of the photos and saw the Bat Tower. With our Florida trip soon to come, the Bat Tower went on our list of must-see oddities. And as a major bonus, there is a benchmark set into the base of the tower!

It was clear from earlier recovery notes that the station and reference marks are either gone or covered over by asphalt, but the azimuth mark—the mark set into the tower base—should still be in place. And it was! We spotted it immediately on the concrete base of one of the tower legs, next to an inscription.

The inscription at the base of the bat tower reads

Dedicated to good health at Perky, Fla., by Mr. and Mrs. R.C. Perky, March 15, 1929.

The tower is immense and definitely odd. It was built in an attempt to house bats that would in turn control the local mosquito population. One of the most interesting features is a central guano-removal chute! Unfortunately, the bats never took up residence.

While the bats didn’t find a home at the tower, a family of ospreys certainly did. Perched atop the tower is a huge osprey nest. As we watched, two adults circled around (probably watching us intently) and one occasionally swooped into the nest to feed the young bird within.