A Bold Experiment
In 1997 J. David Bamberger broke ground on the first ever man-made bat cave.
The project was wildly expensive, and there was little reason to believe it would work. But Bamberger, the esteemed conservationist and erstwhile co-founder of Church’s Chicken, was undaunted. He knew how to create a spectacle, and the press ate it up. Journalists from New York to Berlin covered the story with no shortage of snark. "He's going batty," one headline read. But Bamberger had spent a lifetime confounding naysayers, and he just knew it would work.
Four years after the cave was built, it stood empty. His hypothesis, that engineering a colony of bats could reduce the need for pesticides, was becoming a joke. On a hot summer day in August, a journalist from San Antonio followed up and scooped the story: there were no bats. The very same day, Bamberger took one last walk up to the bat cave, where he witnessed a miracle.
Co-directed and produced by Alex Milan and Andrew Miller, A Bold Experiment premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2020, where it won the jury award for best mini-documentary, and then continued on to the SXSW film festival and beyond, playing at a host of digital events as the COVID-19 pandemic ground everything to a halt. Dox is pleased to make the film available online for all to watch. Please enjoy, share, and subscribe to our channel for more stories like these.
