Trouble in Flamingo

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1:07In 1832, John James Audubon visited the southernmost part of Florida. He wrote that the birds appeared in such numbers to actually block out the light from the sun. In Florida, Audubon saw great white herons, tricolored herons, little blue herons, mangrove cuckoos, roseate spoonbills, flamingos, ibises. He wrote, The birds we saw were almost all new to us. As one writer said, There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they always have been, one of the unique regions of the Earth. What makes Florida a good place for being an ornithologist or even a bird watcher? So for one, we're semi-tropical, And so we get a lot of southern birds that don't occur in other parts of the country, like we have the Everglades snail kite here, and it's a raptor that eats nothing but snails.

2:09And it doesn't get out of Florida. We're hearing from Paul Gray. I'm Dr. Gray when we're being highfalutin. I'm a staff scientist in Audubon, Florida's Everglades Restoration Program. I'm an ecologist by trade, but I study bird history and ornithology just for fun. What nerds do on their time off. One of the first people that went around the Everglades, who was an ornithologist, and documented what was going on was W.E.D. Scott, William Earl Dodge Scott. And he went around the tip of Florida in 1875 and documented these monster wading bird rookeries where they were breeding. A rookery is where birds gather in groups to sort of create their own communities, to protect themselves and make their nests.

3:01Birds of different species can exist side by side in the same rookery. And back in 1875, these rookeries in Florida were home to a huge number of birds. We don't really know how many there were, maybe a million or two million. It might have been the most waiting bird nesting in the world at the time. Paul Gray says that alligators actually may have helped these rookeries become so large. They would be nearby, waiting for a baby bird to fall. Which is bad for that baby bird, but when the alligators are under there, if raccoons or snakes or something goes out there and tries to eat the baby birds or the eggs, the alligators eat them.

3:40So the alligators are kind of a protector, even though they're eating some. At that time, what would the Everglades have looked like? And what would, if you had been on a boat going to see one of these rookeries, what would you have seen? Yeah, so, you know, we're going to go back to Florida in the year 1900. And the Everglades had really not been drained yet. We'd done a little bit of stuff with it, but we really hadn't drained it. And so Florida has a really, really wet summer. And during the summer, the Everglades would completely fill with water and it would be this river. but it would be a river that was like 40 miles wide and only about two or three feet deep.

4:20And the water movement would be almost imperceptible. And then during the dry season, when the water would go down, all of a sudden all the fish would have to swim into the remaining pools, and the pools would get very shallow. And when they got shallow, that's when the wading birds could really get access to a whole bunch of food, and so that's when they would breed. And so that's part of the reason why we had this just super abundance of breeding wading birds is because the Everglades was just perfectly keyed to concentrate the food in the springtime and create this marvel of bird life in South Florida.

4:54In the 1800s, some of the most commonly found birds in the Everglades were egrets, several different kinds, including the great egret and snowy egret, white birds with long necks and long legs. Great egrets can be as tall as four feet. And the thing about the egrets is when they breed, they have these very fancy feathers that stick up out of their backs. They're called egrets. And they are very ornamental. And so that's part of the reason why people were shooting them and plucking their feathers out and shipping them to New York and making hats out of them. Tell me about the hat craze. What was happening with hats, mainly in New York City but all over the country?

5:40Yeah, it just became a fashion trend. People started putting bird feathers in their hats. And not just feathers. Sometimes they'd shoot a bird and mount the whole bird, and a woman would be wearing the entire bird on her head. Full birds. Yeah, the whole bird. But then some of the hats would have feathers, like the aigrets from the snowy egret and the great egret. They can be two to three feet long, so they might be sticking way up in the air. or behind the hat. Sometimes the feathers would be arranged so that it looked like the hat had wings. Some hats had more than just one bird. There's a photo of one hat with three taxidermied green parakeets.

6:24In 1868, in its first year of publication, Harper's Bazaar reported that feather hats were, quote, well-adapted for skating costumes. By 1886, the American Ornithologist Union estimated that 5 million North American birds were killed each year for hats. And if you were in New York City at this time, the late 1800s, how frequently would you see a woman wearing a feather in her hat? So very famously, there's an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Frank Chapman, And he was so fed up with all the feathers in the hats that he went down the street and counted it up. The ornithologist counted 700 hats and noted that 542 had feathers on them.

7:18He saw like 70 different kinds of birds in these hats that were modeled in different ways on top of the hat or their feathers. How much money could you get for these feathers? Yeah, so the story is they were worth more than the weight of gold. You could get up to$35 a feather. The hats were made in New York, but most of the feathers were coming from Florida. And there's one brookery in the Everglades called Cuthbert Brookery. It's a little mangrove island, and it's actually only about one acre. And so it's just this little island that sticks up out of the water, and it would just be full of plume birds.

7:59I mean, the whole island would be white. And not all the plume birds are white, but they're the ones you see. And they would have nests on every single branch in the colony. It's just amazing how many birds can pack into those. And there's a constant racket because all the babies are making noises and stuff like that. And it's quite a bustling place. The rookery was so full of so many birds that one hunter described it as looking like, quote, a flower, a beautiful white blossom. And the first time he went in there, he brought out 265 bird plumes and 147 alligator hides. And then he went out a second time.

8:41And this time he got 900 plumes, and he got$1 ,800 for it, which in the 1880s was really a lot of money. And he bought half of Marco Island. And, you know, if you owned half of Marco Island today, you'd be a billionaire. And he was a respectable citizen of the community, and people didn't, you know, revile him for having made his money by killing plume birds. And so, you know, you can imagine these people that are just dirt poor and don't really have access to money going out and shooting plume birds because that was just one of the ways they could get money in their pocket. Paul Gray says when ornithologists returned to the Everglades around 1900, things looked different.

9:21And all those rookeries were shot out. The birds were not there. And it was from the plume miners. And they'd gone in and just basically killed all the birds. And so he wrote very graphically about how the birds were gone. And he went in there, and there were dead birds laying everywhere. And it was just really a gruesome thing. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

9:52The very first Audubon Society was formed in 1886 by a man named George Bird Grinnell. He was worried that what happened to the American bison would also happen to birds. The bison population had dropped from as many as 60 million to around just 300. By the late 1800s, passenger pigeons were also very nearly extinct. They'd previously had the biggest bird population in the country, and maybe even the world. But hunting drastically decreased their numbers. The last known passenger pigeon would die in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha, and she lived to be about 29 years old. And so we were starting to realize that the wealth of North America was not inexhaustible, that we could actually wipe everything out.

10:47But George Byrd Grinnell didn't expect that so many people would want to join his Audubon Society, and it became too much for him to keep up with. So he quit doing it. But then, not long after, a group of women in Massachusetts started a new Audubon Society. And these women, they were educated, they were married to men, they had a lot of influence, so they had a lot of connections. They had a sensitivity that, you know, we shouldn't be putting feathers on hats. One article in the New York Times in 1898 reported that people were starting to use the expression murderous millinery. People founded Audubon societies all over the country, including in Florida, and they helped convince the government to pass laws to protect birds.

11:33And they would say, okay, here's a bird you can't shoot. But someone would go out and shoot a cardinal, and you'd go arrest them. You know, say, well, you weren't supposed to shoot that. They said, I didn't shoot a cardinal. I shot a redbird, which is the same thing, but all these common names and all these different birds. And so they finally figured out that it's called the model bird law. And they said, okay, we're going to make just a short list of things that we're going to call game birds. And it's going to be the ducks and the geese, and it's going to be grouse and pheasants and quail. And this is the list of things you can shoot.

12:06We're going to put seasons on them and limits so we don't overshoot them. and then everything else that's not on this list, you cannot shoot. And so we finally had laws to protect the birds, but no one was enforcing the laws. And so that's when Audubon decided, well, we're going to hire wardens. The vice president of the Florida Audubon Society wrote that the new game warden must be fully alive to the value of bird protection and a strong, fearless man. And so that's how we hired Guy Bradley.

12:40We'll be right back.

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14:35In June 1902, Guy Bradley was hired as a game warden in Monroe County, Florida. Guy was 32 years old. He and his wife, Franny, had a son. Guy played the fiddle and was the skipper on a boat called the Pearl. He and his family lived in a small community in Florida called Flamingo. Flamingo was just a little tiny settlement. There were maybe 40 or 50 people that lived there. And if you think about Florida back in 1900, there was no air conditioning. It was very, very wet. The mosquitoes were just unbelievable in the summer. Actually, there are records of cows getting exsanguinated, and exsanguination means you lose so much blood you die.

15:21And so these people were living in these ramshackle buildings along the beach, and they didn't really have finished lumber and good screens and all that. And so one of the things they did to protect themselves from mosquitoes is always have a smudge pot burning inside the house to make it smoky. and in the smoke, the mosquitoes couldn't function very well. So these people lived in smoke all the time. There's a story about a man who visited Flamingo and went to a small community church on a Sunday. And there was a baby stroller, and they had a smudge pot underneath the baby who was keeping the baby in smoke the whole time.

16:00And, you know, there's no stores in town. And so it was a subsistence living for everybody. And so they had a garden, and they would grow vegetables, and they might try to grow extra sugar cane and sell it. About 70 miles southwest of Flamingo is Key West, at one point the largest city in Florida. From Flamingo, you got to sail a boat out there. And there were no roads, and so if you lived there, the way you made a living was you would fish and eat the fish and try to sell them in Key West. You'd kill alligators and skin their hides. you would shoot plume birds, and then you'd sell the feathers.

16:40Now, it was Guy Bradley's job to stop people from shooting the birds. Had this ever been done before? You know, that you had a warden who was now going to be just looking at the birds? No, and he was the very first one. Guy would be paid$35 a month, and would report to the head of the National Committee of Audubon Societies, William Dutcher. And it was funny because when he got hired, there was a law and he was writing to Dutcher up in New York and saying, the people down here don't believe in the law. They don't think it exists. Because he was going around and he was posting rookeries and saying, you know, it's illegal to shoot these birds, leave them alone.

17:22And, of course, you know, a lot of these people made their money off it. So they're like, what's with that? And so Dutcher sent Guy a copy of the law. He just said, well, just show him this copy of the law. And Guy would show it to people, but a lot of them were illiterate or they just didn't believe that that was really the law, so it didn't really mean much. And so it was kind of this guy from New York thinking that Guy Bradley's job would be straightforward. But, you know, that was part of the challenge of Guy Bradley, is not only convincing people that it was against the law, but getting them to stop once they knew it.

17:55Guy Bradley's father had moved the family to Florida from Chicago when Guy was six years old. They eventually settled in the Palm Beach area. The author Stuart B. McIver writes that Florida back then was, quote, a land without school or churches, all too often without laws or governments. Guy's father, Edwin, did whatever he could to support the family, and at one point, he became a very unique kind of mailman. Before 1885, a letter sent from the Palm Beach area could take up to two months to arrive about 70 miles south in Miami. First, the letter would be taken by stagecoach, steamboat, and train to New York City.

18:42Then it would be sent back south to Havana on a steamer. And finally, it would be taken on one last boat to Miami. All of this was easier than sending the letter straight from Palm Beach to Miami, which would involve crossing dense jungle with no roads. But the post office came up with a plan. If someone could walk along the coast, right on the beach, they could deliver the mail in just three days, instead of two months. It would come to be known as the barefoot route, because walking on the beach was easier barefoot. And the first barefoot postman the post office hired was Guy Bradley's father, Edwin.

19:28His route involved walking 160 miles round trip every week. Do you know that this summer I walked 30 miles on the beach as a stunt? So I was thinking about that male route and thinking whether I could do it. And the best part, the thing I learned, was keeping your right leg moving quicker than your left leg to help with that slant on the sand. Yeah, and his technique for walking on the beach and getting down near the waterline where the sand was firmer. It's fantastic. Well, it's really hard work walking in the sand. That's what I can tell you from experience. One day, something odd happened. Florida is famous for shipwrecks.

20:18And so apparently a ship that had a bunch of wine on it broke apart and all these casks floated up. And so everybody ran down to the beach and grabbed all these casks and everybody drank a bunch of wine for a while. It became known as the Great Wine Wreck. Guy's father took some of the casks and buried them in the sand along his mail route so he could stop here and there and have a drink. There's a similar story with coconuts. Some ships sunk and all these coconuts came ashore, so everybody planted coconut trees all over South Florida. That's how Palm Beach got its name. In 1898, Guy Bradley's family moved south to Flamingo.

21:00When Guy was a boy, he actually went out and shot plume birds too and sold the feathers. And when Audubon came around and was looking for somebody to hire, Guy had not shot birds for a while, and he'd just gotten married, and he had two kids. And so he needed an income, and so when Audubon offered him the job, he took it. So Guy Bradley used to hunt birds. Now he was going to be protecting these birds. What was he going to be asked to do? What was the job going to entail? So the first job was just to try to spread the word that it's illegal to shoot plume birds, that he was going to be enforcing that law.

21:40And again, as we discussed, you know, he had trouble convincing a lot of people. And then the second job is he actually had a gun and a badge and he could arrest people. And the plume bird law, if you killed a bird, you were fined$5 and you could get up to 10 days in jail. And which$5 back then was a pretty significant fine, but it wasn't, you know, lethal. And so like Walter Smith was shooting plume birds. Walter Smith was a man who'd moved his family to Flamingo around the same time Guy Bradley's family arrived. Walter Smith was kind of a cantankerous person. He had been in the Confederate Army.

22:21He was a sharpshooter, apparently. He had been wounded. He was not real popular in Flamingo, and he had his schooner, the Cleveland, and he killed plume birds. He killed alligators for their skins and otters for their skins and, you know, kind of lived off the land. But he was just, you know, one more person. And he had four children. And so he had to support them. And so the notion that he's out there killing plumbers to make some money, it's kind of a practical thing for him to be doing, even though it's against the law. And that was part of the problem with Bradley's job is you're working with people who, you know, you can tell them it's against the law, but they're like, well, that's a dumb law.

23:00I'm not going to follow it. When did Guy hear something was going to happen at Cuthbert Rookery? So Cuthbert was one of the only rookeries left because it was very, very remote, and not very many people knew where it was. Guy had successfully protected Cuthbert Rookery for two years. But in the winter of 1904, Walter Smith gave Guy Bradley a warning. Someone was going to shoot the birds at Cuthbert Rookery. And so Guy would go out there and make sure nobody was out there, but people could watch him because it's out in the middle of the lake. And so he'd stay out there for a couple days, but then he'd have to go back to town for supplies, and it was like 14 miles from town.

23:44And then someone did go to Cuthbert Rookery and shot hundreds of birds. No one stepped forward to confess. Guy told a visiting ornithologist you could have walked right around the rookery on birds' bodies, between 400 and 500 of them Guy told the ornithologist people weren't listening to him and that he'd even been shot at by plume hunters Do you think that Guy knew what he was getting himself into that this could be dangerous? Yes, he very clearly knew that he told several of his friends that he had some people that he needed to deal with that he was pretty scared of. And he even talked about sneaking around and, you know, before he arrested anybody, he wanted to sneak up on them and see what they were doing and what their capabilities and all that were before he went in.

24:40Because again, if you're a warden and you're working alone in the wilderness, no witnesses, and the people that you're going up to are armed, it's really dangerous. And then, in the span of a few months, Guy Bradley caught members of Walter Smith's family shooting birds three different times. He arrested Walter one time, and then Walter's son Tommy, he was about 17, and Guy arrested him twice. After Guy Bradley arrested Walter Smith's son for the second time, Walter told Guy, You ever arrest one of my boys again, I'll kill you.

25:21We'll be right back.

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