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.

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. We're now excited to launch the film publicly online. Please enjoy and share it freely! Subscribe, comment, like and share to support us in telling more stories like these.

"I wanted something quite a bit more than a bat house. I wanted it big time."

J. David Bamberger