Merlin Tuttle attended UT from fall 1959 to spring 1961 as an undergraduate. He graduated from Andrews College in Michigan in 1964. Following his sophomore year, he went on the American Museum of Natural History’s Uruguayan Expedition, through which he worked in the field with Dr. Karl Koopman, one of the most respected bat taxonomists in the world. He entered the University of Kansas for graduate school (on probation) and received the PhD in 1974 with honors.
In 1959 he had begun a project on gray bats, discovering that while all the reference works indicated they were not migratory, they in fact were. This study provided the basis for his doctoral dissertation. In 1978, when asked to write a chapter for the National Geographic Society’s book Wild Animals of North America, he realized that existing photographs of bats were not representative of their function. He began to take pictures of bats to show them in their appropriate roles. In 1982 he established Bat Conservation International and in 1986 resigned a top research position to do bat conservation full time. He is the author of America’s Neighborhood Bats and a variety of other pamphlets and books. BCI is located in Austin, Texas.