Listen to the sensitive but uneducated Bill House [...] talking about what it was like to shoot egrets [garças] for their feathers. Hunters, he tells us, always shot early in the breeding season when the plumes were coming out "real good," and a man with a Flobert rifle could stand in a big rookery and pick off birds as fast as he could reload:
A broke-up rookery, that ain't a picture you want to think about too much. The pile of carcasses left behind when you strip the plumes and move on to the next place is just pitiful, and it's a piss-poor way to harvest, cause there ain't no adults left to feed them young and protect 'em from the sun and rain, let alone the crows and buzzards that come sailing and flopping in, tear 'em to pieces....Such a description, quite early in the book, sets the stage for the often senseless and violent deaths to follow, while also registering for our twenty-first-century ears the horror surrounding this steady destruction of a species:
It's the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghosty trees on dead white guano ground, the sun and silence and dry stink, the squawking and flopping of their wings, and varmints hurrying in without no sound, coons, rats, and possums, biting and biting, and the ants flowing up all them white trees in their dark ribbons to eat at them raw scrawny things that's backed up to the edge of the nest, gullets pulsing and mouths open wide for the food and water that ain't never going to come. Luckiest ones will perish before something finds 'em, cause they's so many young that the carrion birds just can't keep up. Damn vultures set hunched up on them dead limbs so stuffed they can't hardly fly.
A real big rookery like that one the Frenchman worked up Tampa Bay had four-five hundred acres of black mangrove, maybe ten nests to a tree. Might take you three-four years to clean it out but after that them birds are gone for good.
An Epic of the Everglades
By Michael Dirda
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