Dangling high off the ground, strung along cable between five large cottonwood trees at Tifft Nature Preserve, is a cluster of 20 shiny pods that both grabs your attention and makes you scratch your head.
What is it?
Of course, that’s just the reaction Joyce Hwang wants.
“Bat Cloud,” as her creation is called, is an unusual array of hanging bat houses installed at the refuge in May by the University at Buffalo architecture professor with the help of current and former students.
But more than a habitat, it’s an eco-sculpture, a work of art designed to draw attention to one of nature’s most maligned mammals.
“They’re sort of picked on as animals,” said Hwang, 37, a faculty member at UB since 2005. “Whenever anybody thinks of them these days, you think of Halloween cards, Dracula movies and other types of images that don’t render them in a very good light.
“So, I think it’s about time we start looking at bats in a different way,” Hwang said. “Bats are animals that are very critical to our ecosystem. They serve as natural pesticides and pollinators. I don’t know how many people are aware that bats eat loads of mosquitoes, so just for the sake of human comfort they’re quite important.”
They’re also disappearing in record numbers.
Thanks to some funding from the School of Architecture and Planning and UB’s Humanities Institute, Bat Cloud was constructed at Tifft Nature Preserve in a swath of woodland just off a trail near the Visitor Center.
The pods, which resemble mini space capsules, are made of layers of steel mesh, insulation, plastic and aluminum. Each pod is designed as its own sustainable ecosystem.
The upper portion is the roosting area, while the lower section is filled with soil and plants, which are fertilized by the bat guano and attract insects for the bats to eat.
“We liked the idea of trying to produce this cloudlike formation,” Hwang said. “Some of the early renderings, you have this thing that looks like this amorphous blob hanging in the woods, so we wanted that sort of effect where you would see it from far away and say, ‘What the heck is that thing?’”
Hwang has been consulting with Katharina Dittmar, a bat expert and faculty member in UB’s department of biological sciences.
While Bat Cloud provides researchers insight into the roosting habits of bats, the habitat has yet to become permanent home for the winged creatures, Dittmar said. That could take some time.
One of the problems, Dittmar said, is white-nose syndrome, a disease that has been killing off millions of hibernating bats in Eastern North America.
Named for the fungal growth found on the noses of infected bats, white-nose syndrome has been depleting some roosts by as much as 90 percent, Dittmar said.
“In the worst-case scenario, it doesn’t get adopted by bats,” Dittmar said of Bat Cloud, “but there’s still this huge education component and awareness that it has created.”
“It’s also a really nice interaction between architecture and biology,” Dittmar said. “I don’t think many people have straddled that boundary before.”
This isn’t the first time Hwang has blended architecture with ecology, a niche the California native is developing. In 2010, Hwang and UB students erected “Bat Tower,” a twisted, 12-foot-tall bat house made of triangular segments of plywood and arranged in a ribbed, accordion-like pattern beside a pond at Griffis Sculpture Park in Cattaraugus County.
Hwang also is working on a similar project for bats and birds called “Habitat Wall,” which has caught the attention of the Audubon Society.
In addition, she was one of the UB professors involved with erecting a 22-foot-tall, hexagon-shaped tower designed to draw honeybees that had taken up residence at the Silo City grain elevator complex on Childs Street.
“I think one of the most overlooked issues in architecture and design is how we think about urban wildlife, and it’s a difficult thing, because a lot of people continue to see wildlife, like bats or bees, as pests, Hwang said.”
