Merlin Devere Tuttle is an American ecologist, conservationist, writer and wildlife photographer who has specialized in batecology, behavior, and conservation. He is credited with protecting the Austin Congress Avenue Bridge bat colony from extermination. Tuttle is currently active as founder and executive director of Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation in Austin, Texas. Tuttle is known for his lifetime of work in bat research and preservation, founding the conservation organizations Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation and Bat Conservation International, his efforts in the establishment of the National Park of American Samoa, his research on gray batpopulation ecologymigration, and the frog-eating bats Trachops cirrhosus. Tuttle's photography of bats has been featured in numerous National Geographic Society publications, including 100 Best Pictures and 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery. In 2002, the United States Postal Service released a commemorative stamp series featuring Tuttle's photographs. In 2019, Tuttle served as science editor and photographer for the Smithsonian Books publication BATS: an illustrated guide to all species. He has received accolades for his research and conservation work, including the Gerritt S. Miller Jr. Award, and has been honored by the Texas State House of Representatives. In 2015, Tuttle published his memoir, The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures With the World’s Most Misunderstood Mammals.
Early life
Tuttle earned a bachelor of arts degree in zoology from Andrews University, located in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He then entered graduate school at the University of Kansas, where he studied systematics, ecology, and evolution. His master's thesis focused on zoogeography of Peruvian bats. He obtained his Ph.D in 1974, completing his dissertation on population ecology and migration of gray bats. He subsequently published several academic papers based on his research, as well as numerous books about bats.
Smithsonian Venezuelan Project
In 1965, Tuttle was hired by the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution to co-direct an expedition into the Amazonian Rainforest territory of Venezuela. The project, coordinated by Charles O. Handley, Jr., curator of mammals at National Museum of Natural History, was intended to collect a large, representative sample of Venezuelan mammals and their ectoparasites in order to study mammal-parasite-habitat relationships. Upon arriving in Venezuela with his field team, Tuttle was captured in Caracas by communist guerillas of the Revolutionary Left Movement who at this time were struggling in armed conflict against the Venezuelan army.
In 1985, BCI trustees Verne and Marion Read, Paul Cox, a professor of botany at Brigham Young University and Tuttle traveled to American Samoa to investigate the decline of Samoan Flying Fox populations due to the decimation of their habitat and commercial hunting. Their work evolved into a successful two-year initiative to create the National Park of American Samoa with the aid of American Samoa Governor A.P. Lutali, Lt. Governor Eni Hunkin, Samoan chiefs and a coalition of legislators and supporters. On October 31, 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the Samoan park bill into law, establishing the first-ever tropical rainforest protected by the U.S. National Park Service and included 8,500 acres of pristine rainforest, coastal habitat, and coral atolls.
In March 1986, Tuttle resigned from his position as Curator of Mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin and relocated his fledgling conservation organization to Austin, which had been making national headline news for its urban bat population. At the time, the Congress Avenue Bridge bats were widely unpopular and the colony was at risk of extermination. Tuttle's public education campaign to save the bats through dispelling myths and misconceptions about their threats to the citizens of Austin was met with widespread skepticism and earned him the 1986 Texas Monthly Bum Steer Award. However, with help from a coalition of leaders in the Austin community, the Public Health Department, and news media, Tuttle's persistent education efforts successfully reversed public opinion about the bats and turned the Congress Avenue Bridge bat colony into the highly-profitable tourist attraction for the city of Austin that it is today.
