From Publishers Weekly
In the late 19th century, McIver explains, as many as five million egrets, herons, flamingos, spoonbills, terns, cormorants and other species were killed each year in Florida, shot by plume hunters who often decimated entire rookeries and sold the feathers to the American millinery trade to decorate women's hats. In 1901, to save them from extinction, the American Ornithologists' Union, backed by the newly formed Audubon Society, persuaded the Florida legislature to pass a law making the killing of birds other than game birds illegal. In his carefully researched account of the struggle between environmentalists and plume hunters, McIver (Hemingway's Key West) tells the story of Guy Bradley, a reformed plume hunter in the frontier town of Flamingo, who was hired in 1902 as game warden of Monroe County and three years later was killed while trying to enforce the unpopular law. McIver spends a lot of time on details of Bradley's family history and on the changes wrought on southern Florida by the developer and railroad magnate Henry Morrison Flagler, a story that is important in its own right but adds little to the account of Bradley's murder. His killer, a plume hunter whose son the game warden was trying to arrest for shooting birds, got off scot-free because there was so little sympathy for the Florida bird protection law. McIver's story might have been more effective if he had spent more time looking into the lives of the Everglades' settlers and showing how a law that increased their economic hardship could lead to murder. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It's one thing to dedicate your life to speaking out about the need to protect endangered species; it's another to put your life on the line. By vividly relating the highly dramatic story of Guy Bradley (1870-1905), "first martyr in the fight to protect wild birds," prolific writer and documentary filmmaker McIver rescues from obscurity a key chapter in the history of American environmentalism. Bradley came of age in the wilds of south Florida at the height of the mania for feather-festooned women's hats, a craze that decimated the Everglades' once gloriously fecund rookeries. As wealthy entrepreneur Henry Morrison Flagler conjured Palm Beach and Miami out of the swampy wilderness, and tough, well-armed men did whatever it took to earn a living, millions of egrets, flamingos, and herons were systematically slaughtered. The first bird protection law was finally passed in 1901, and Bradley, smart and courageous, was hired to enforce it as game warden and deputy sheriff, a harrowing undertaking that ended in a fatal confrontation. With great finesse, McIver evokes Bradley's tumultuous world, chronicles the pitched battle to save wild birds, and resurrects a true folk hero.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
