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In 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, and 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. That's 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. Birds 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. So 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, right?
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. And 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.
In 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?
Yeah, 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 the 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 egrets from the Sonoe 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.
In 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 five 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 is 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. He 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 wide.
And so it's just this little island that sticks up out of the water, and it would just be full of plume birds. I 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 shot, he brought out 265 bird plumes and 147 alligator hides. And then he went out a second time. And 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.
And 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. The 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. But 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 that 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. And 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, and 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. We'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. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Etsy. It seems like handmade things are becoming harder to find. Lately, I've been in the market for some interesting ceramic wall sconces and pendant lights. And I found a person in Vermont who will make them to order on the pottery wheel. You can request special sizing and finishes. When you're searching for a gift or just shopping for yourself, you can find something made with care and attention by a real person on Etsy.
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In 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's 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. And 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. And, 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. Now, 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 is 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. And of course, you know, a lot of these people made their money off it. So they're like, but 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. Guy 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. Then 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. His route involved walking a 160-mile round trip every week.
Do you know that I, this summer, I walked 30 miles on the beach as a stunt. So I was thinking about that mail 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. And so apparently a ship that had a bunch of wine on it broke apart and all these casts floated up. And so everybody ran down to the beach and grabbed all these casts 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 ship 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. When 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. And 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 refined $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. He was a sharpshooter, apparently. He had been wounded many,
He was not real popular in Flamingo and he had his schooner, the Cleveland, and he killed bloom 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 plume birds 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. I'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.
And 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 four and five hundred 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 would, 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 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. Because 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. We'll be right back.
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much?
I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim-blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Around 9 o'clock on the morning of July 8th, 1905, Guy Bradley was at home with his family when he heard the sound of gunshots. And there's a key, which is a little mangrove-covered island a couple miles out in Florida Bay,
And he looked out there and he saw Captain Smith's schooner. It was called the Cleveland. It was like a 53-foot sailboat. And so Guy paddled out there. And he normally would have gone out there with some of his friends, but nobody was around to go with him. So he went out there by himself. And it was Smith, his two sons, and then two guys that they had hired to work. And so his two sons were in the rookery shooting the rookery out. Walter Smith fired a warning shot to let his sons know that Guy was coming.
His sons both shot one last time into the rookery, clearly in Guy's field of vision. Then they returned to their boat, holding dead cormorants. And reportedly Guy gets out there and he says, you got a hand over Tommy, I saw him shoot a bird. And Smith said, well, you need a warrant. And Guy says, no, I saw him shoot the bird. Walter Smith later said he picked up his rifle and told Guy, if you want him, you've got to come aboard this boat and take him.
Guy replied, put down that rifle, and I will come aboard. Then, according to Walter Smith, Guy shot at him and missed, and Walter Smith shot back. When he returned home, he told his family, I'm going to Key West to give myself up. I've killed Guy Bradley. When Guy didn't come home that evening, his wife knew something was wrong. The next morning, a friend of the family went out to look for Guy, and he found him dead in his boat.
The friend found Guy's gun next to him and said that Guy's gun was full. That it didn't have any bullets shot out of it. But Walter Smith said Guy did shoot at him. And he pointed at a hole up on his mast and said that's where the bullet hole is. And you think about shooting one shot and hitting a mast on a sailboat, that's kind of a lucky shot. No one went to check to see if there was actually a bullet in there. Walter Smith went to Key West to turn himself in. He told his family Guy had died.
But he told the sheriff, quote, I don't know whether he's dead or just badly injured. His stance was that it had been self-defense. The lawyer Audubon hired wrote, in my opinion, it was a cold-blooded murder. The lawyer said he thought Walter Smith deliberately sent his boys into that rookery for the purpose of enticing Bradley out, for the purpose of killing him. A grand jury was convened.
Walter Smith's defense lawyer knew that a lot of people in the county didn't like the laws prohibiting plume hunting, so maybe there wouldn't be that much sympathy for Guy Bradley. In the end, the prosecution only called one witness and didn't challenge some of the discrepancies in Walter Smith's story, like the fact that the man who found Guy said there weren't any bullets missing from his gun.
And so the grand jury, in the end, they couldn't really have enough evidence to prosecute. And so they passed a ruling of no true bill, which apparently means there's not enough evidence to see that it was murder. Walter Smith was let go. Audubon raised money for Guy Bradley's widow and children. They moved to Key West and bought a house there. Guy Bradley was buried at East Cape Sable, the southernmost point on the mainland of the U.S.,
Did Audubon replace Guy Bradley, put someone else in the position? No, they didn't. They just kind of gave up. They just decided that you just couldn't put a single person out there in the wilderness and have them be safe and have them enforce a very unpopular law. And so they did not replace Guy Bradley. Guy wasn't the only Audubon warden who was killed. In 1908, three years later, Columbus MacLeod over in Sarasota County over on the Gulf Coast died.
He disappeared and they found his boat and his hat had what looked like axe marks in it and blood. So we think he was killed by plume miners. There was an Audubon warden in South Carolina, Presley Reeves, and he got shot and killed in 1908. So...
One of the things that a historian wrote after Bradley was killed that, you know, he was shot in 1905 and those other two guys were shot in 1908. And in 1911, New York passed a law that said you cannot import bird feathers anymore. And this is 90% of the millinery trade in the country was in New York. And so in 1911, when that law got passed and effectively shut them down,
That was really a big deal. And one of the historians said if Bradley had been successful and just kept people out of the plume bird colonies and hadn't gotten killed, he probably would not have been that impactful. The act of getting killed and becoming a martyr really helped bring attention to this and helped shut down a huge industry in New York City. How long did it take for this feather, women's hat feather craze to die down?
A long time. You know, once the millinery industry got shut down, there's still hats around and people were still wearing them. But there was becoming a social stigma about wearing dead things on your head and stuff like that. But even, I've worked on Lake Okeechobee and we had an Audubon warden on Lake Okeechobee in the 1940s. And Eleanor Roosevelt visited and she was wearing a bird plume in her hat. In 1947, the Everglades became a national park.
The plaque at Guy Bradley's memorial in Flamingo reads, His martyrdom created nationwide indignation, strengthened bird protection laws, and helped bring Everglades National Park into being. They have a visitor center down there, and it's the Guy Bradley Visitor Center. And they have a hiking trail, and it's the Guy Bradley Hiking Trail. And I think his legacy is, you know, he gave his life for something that he believed in and loved.
Some people think shooting a bird's not that big of a deal, but Guy apparently did and was willing to put his life on the line for that idea. And that's a pretty interesting amount of devotion to have for a person. Today, in the U.S., if you shoot a plume bird, you could be fined up to $250,000 and be sentenced to up to two years in jail. And the bird population in the Everglades has recovered some.
And an interesting thing about the wading birds is they were so low back in 1900 that there just really weren't many around. And once we got the shooting stopped, they started recovering. And by 1950, we probably had maybe a half million wading birds in the Everglades.
But then in 1950, we built the Central and Southern Flood Control District. You know, we had some very wet hurricanes, and the state of Florida went to the US Army Corps of Engineers and said, "Will you help us drain this state? It's too wet. We can't function here." And so they did. They built a very efficient drainage system. And we still have 50% of the Everglades wetlands left. The other 50% have been filled in or drained. But we only have 10% of the birds.
And the reason is because the remaining wetlands are all messed up because of all the drainage and all the pollution and all the things that we've done. And so the wading bird population has recovered from the hunting, but now they've declined because of habitat problems. And that's what Everglades Reservation is about, is we're trying to build them back up to higher levels. The plume bird stories, you know, I read about this and it took them 50 years to get somewhere. And I'm sitting here struggling in my own career trying to clean up Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades and all that.
And I'm hoping that, you know, I'm part of this changing society's ideas about how we treat the earth and how we treat our resources. Shortly after Guy Bradley died, the first president of the National Association of Audubon Societies wrote that he faithfully guarded his wards, the plume birds, traveling thousands of miles in order to watch over them.
Every great movement must have its martyrs, and Guy M. Bradley is the first martyr in the cause of bird protection. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Special thanks to Mary Russell Robertson.
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.
We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Amazon Prime is more than a shipping and streaming subscription. It's the thing you need when a spark of inspiration hits. Say you're itching to revisit your old comic booking hobby.
Get fast, free shipping on a sketchbook, brushes, and pens with Prime so you can bring to life that antihero you dreamt up all those years ago. Find inspiration in your favorite thrilling satire or an action-packed superhero dramedy, all on Prime Video. And with Amazon Music, you can discover the perfect playlist for your soundtrack as you create whatever you're into, from streaming to shopping. It's on Prime. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to get more out of whatever you're into.