Seasons at Selah: The Legacy of Bamberger Ranch Preserve by Andrew Sansom

Author:Andrew Sansom [Sansom, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2018-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

With the kind of opportunity to view bats that the installation at Bracken Cave provided, coupled with the educational outreach at BCI, bat watching soon became a significant attraction throughout the Hill Country of Texas. And as public interest in the pursuit grew, the idea of developing Bracken Cave as a full-on tourist attraction began to build. Tuttle, some of his board members, and boosters from San Antonio envisioned a major development at the cave, an elaborate architectural facility that would include exhibits and be able to accommodate large numbers of people.

This push to commercialize the site was too much for J. David, whose toil and sweat at the cave had enabled it to become much more accessible but in a low-key and sensitive manner that did not threaten the natural resource itself. Following an inevitable clash with Tuttle, J. David retired from the BCI board and did his own thing.

At the age of sixty-nine, when most people are about done, J. David decided to create his own bat cave—in his words, “the world’s largest man-made structure specifically designed for the free will use of half a million mammals.” As construction got under way, I went out to Selah and met Jim Smith, the project engineer for the undertaking, whom J. David had met in New Mexico.

Only Bamberger would have spent more than $150,000 to build what, at that point in its construction, resembled giant playground “monkey bars,” with thousands of pieces of steel rebar wound together in the shape of a huge igloo. As the project—quickly dubbed “Bamberger’s Folly”—evolved, it began to resemble the domes of a cathedral, and before it was done, in addition to twenty tons of rebar and eight thousand square feet of wire lath, the structure included fully two hundred cubic yards of gunite cement.

I have to admit even I was skeptical. By this time, based on the near-miraculous things I had seen him accomplish at the ranch, I knew he could pull it off. But as he spread guano on the floor to attract what he hoped would be thousands of new residents to what he now called his “chiroptorium” (from Chiroptera, the scientific order bats belong to, and the word “auditorium”), I fervently hoped he was right.

An interminable five full years passed with no bats, and it looked like it wasn’t going to work. J. David had included an observation chamber inside the structure for the purpose of viewing the little creatures at close range. I remember thinking during construction how cool it would be to be inside the habitat and watch their behavior through three large plate-glass windows. As it turned out, the bats apparently did not like the glass at all. After the ranch crew covered the windows for good in the winter of 2003, several thousand bats arrived the following summer.

One of the great moments of my long relationship with J. David Bamberger came when he invited Nona and me to sit on the back of his pickup and be

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