American Folly, American Dream

In 1997, J. David Bamberger commissioned the world’s largest man-made bat cave, to be built on a large tract of parched land in the Texas Hill Country he had purchased almost 30 years earlier. The cave cost at least $170,000 and was dubbed the Chiroptorium, a marriage of auditorium and chiroptera, the taxonomic order for bats. Its structure consisted of three domes—eight thousand square feet of roosting space—made from twenty tons of rebar sprayed with gunite, a mixture of sand, water, and cement most often used in the construction of in-ground pools. “I wanted to demonstrate that man-made habitat can mitigate man-made damage,” Bamberger told a reporter for BATS magazine.

Specifically, he wanted to provide an alternate habitat for Mexican free-tailed bats, which weigh about as much as a AAA battery and can, in a single night, fly over sixty miles from home and then back while eating their own weight in bugs.

This species also roosts in the nearby Bracken Cave, the world’s largest bat colony and one of the highest known concentrations of mammals on the planet. When Bamberger built his Chiroptorium, Bracken Cave was at risk of being developed, and he wanted to create a template for allowing threatened bats to survive.

The press loves an unusual gamble. Skeptics took to calling the Chiroptorium “Bamberger’s Folly,” and Texas Monthly and The New York Times both asked, “Will they come?” For the first four years, almost none did. But in 2003, Bamberger noticed dead bats on the ground below a bank of observation windows in the cave and realized that the glass reflected light from the entrance, creating the illusion of another way out. He had the windows covered, and soon, thousands of bats arrived, followed by more the next summer. Bamberger later told the Boston Globe, “All of a sudden—bam!—bats came out of there for 21 minutes. I had tears running down my face… My God, I was vindicated.” The Chiroptorium is now home to some two hundred thousand bats.

A consummate storyteller, Bamberger has adopted this phrase as his own, a name for the period of doubt and disbelief preceding an earned success. It’s as if he’s added a wait-and-see clause to the word Merriam-Webster’s definition is particularly worth quoting because of the sample sentence it provides: “Paying so much for that land was , since it was all rocks and scrubs and trees.” The dictionary employs the breadth of the following definitions for : “lack of good sense,” “criminally or tragically foolish,” and “an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking.” The term is deliciously apt, because also refers to those buildings and ruins constructed by wealthy landowners—particularly in 18th- and 19th-century England—as non-functional, ornamental additions