Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

Dateline: Big Pine Key Deer poachers' tactics show true cowardice August 20, 1985

This is how the brave hunter works.

He conies at dusk and parks by the side of the road, where he waits with a rifle across his lap.

As night falls, a delicate silhouette slips out of the pinelands and crosses the pavement. The deer is graceful and small, no larger than a golden retriever. It is not afraid of the car or the man, because each evening now there are cars and people.

This is the place they come to feed the rare Key deer.

It is illegal to do so, but the tourists come anyway with their Toll House cookies and stale Doritos and picnic leftovers. They bring the kids to see Bambi close up, not understanding how easy they make it for the brave hunter.

Because the deer are losing their fear of man.

And the brave hunter is clever. He also brought morsels tonight, something the animals will like.

The brave hunter holds the goodies out the window of the car and, sure enough, the deer stops its crossing. Its velvet nose twitches, the ears flutter.

The man speaks softly, just like the cooing tourists. The deer takes one tentative step toward the car. Then another.

The brave hunter urges the deer to come, take the food from his hand. So the deer, not knowing any better, approaches the car.

And when the animal is very close, perhaps no more than eight feet away, the brave hunter raises his rifle and fires, killing the tame quarry with one or two or even three shots.

Since the Key deer is protected by law, and since the brave hunter is not quite brave enough to do time in a federal prison, he must be cautious. He quickly skins out the deer and finds a place in the car to conceal the venison, which is easy because there is hardly enough for steaks. Then the brave hunter escapes down U.S. 1.

The Key deer are slowly dying off.

Only 250 to 300 adult animals are left. Deborah Holle, manager of Key Deer Refuge on Big Pine Key, already has found 25 dead this year, most the victims of roving dogs and careless drivers—the cost of the rapid development of Big Pine.

The poachers' toll is high but unknown, for the evidence vanishes with the culprit. The preferred weapon is a gun, though Holle says knives, bludgeons and even more ghastly methods are used to ensure a silent kill. A few months ago she picked up a discarded garbage bag and inside found a severed doe's head, one leg, a tawny hide and a man's sandal.

Sadly, the deer are not wise enough to know the difference between a goofy camper handing out Pringles and a poacher handing out death. Rangers warn visitors not to feed the deer and signs are posted to trees, but nothing works. "For the deer's sake," Holle says, "we have to keep the wild in them."

Two weeks ago, a pregnant doe was slaughtered after dark on nearby No Name Key. A Monroe County sheriffs deputy chased and finally stopped four men in a pickup truck.

Three of them escaped into the mangroves, where we can only hope they were ravaged by billions of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, or worse. The Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission (1-800-452-2046) is offering $1,000 for information leading to their capture.

The fourth man in the pickup was arrested. Authorities identified him as Gerardo Blanco, a Mariel refugee living on Stock Island in Key West. So far, he has been charged with one misdemeanor violation of the Endangered Species Act, for which he could spend a year in jail and get a $10,000 fine.

At a hearing Blanco told a U.S. magistrate that he knew nothing of the dead doe stuffed behind the seat of the truck, or of the .22-caliber rifle allegedly used to shoot the animal at extremely close range.

Then there was the odd matter of the carrots.

"There were carrots in the vehicle," Deborah Holle says, fresh carrots to entice the deer.

This is how the brave hunter works.

Manatees still hapless victims of area boaters January 8, 1986

She floated clockwise in the current.

That she could move at all was miraculous, but every few minutes a whiskered nose poked through the surface to take a breath. She drifted in a special tank hidden from the Seaquarium's main attractions; not far away, people clapped for the killer whale show.

Dr. Jesse White, a veterinarian, studied the manatee and said, "What amazes me is that she can still move the back of her tail. There's four, maybe six major lacerations of her back, then one big chunk. The propeller had to be at least 20 inches in circumference—that's from a Cigarette boat on up."

The boat ran her down last Thursday in a Stuart waterway. The props shredded the animal's tail to raw pulp and tracked an awful spiral trail across her flesh. The folks who did this certainly knew—the impact would have been comparable to smashing a 900-pound log. Yet they sped away, leaving the young manatee spinning in a cloud of her own blood.

Amazingly, she was able to swim, and for some reason went south. By late Friday she made it under the Kobe Sound Bridge; by Saturday morning, Jupiter Inlet. At dusk Sunday she was spotted offshore at Juno Beach.

By dawn Monday she lay dying in the warm waters of Florida Power & Light's Riviera Beach power station. She had traveled more than 30 miles before the Florida Marine Patrol and rescue workers could get a net on her. By this time she was too weak to struggle.

Back at the Seaquarium, Dr. White cut away strips of dead and rotting flesh. Using a seven-inch needle, he gave the manatee two enormous injections of antibiotics. Afterward the doctor stood by the tank and stared at the wounds. "Damn," he said, under his breath.

The seasonal slaughter has begun. Cold weather has driven the slow-moving sea cows to warm water, where mindless boaters run them down. Last week three manatees in South Florida were killed this way.

You'd have to live under a rock not to know better. Jimmy Buffett sings songs and Gov. Graham goes on TV, and warning signs are posted throughout the inland waterways. The law is tough and the fine for speeding in protected waters is steep, averaging $119.

Still, boatloads of morons don't care. Go out any Sunday and watch them tear through the cooling canal at Port Everglades.

Sgt. Royce Hamilton of the Marine Patrol helped with the Riviera Beach rescue. This time of year he writes a lot of tickets to boaters speeding through manatee zones.

"We've had people tell us that manatees are like dinosaurs, and nobody misses them. We get that all the time. I had an attorney who I arrested last year who said he hadn't seen a manatee in five years. As I was writing the ticket one surfaced right by his boat! That shut him down real fast."

It would be easy to blame the snowbirds for the mayhem against the manatees, but Hamilton said this is not fair. Most of those arrested, he noted, are year-round Florida residents, "the ones who should have the most concern."

At the Seaquarium, Dr. White pointed at the drifting manatee and said, "The third cut is so deep it hit the spinal cord longitudinally … the only wounds I've seen worse than this are on dead animals."

Up close she looks as if she's been chewed by a threshing machine. Odds of survival: "Very slim."

Somehow the manatee made it through Monday night. On Tuesday morning she got another jolt of antibiotics. Dr. White talked more hopefully of saving the animal and including her in the Seaquarium's captive breeding program, saying, "We keep putting babies back in the world to take the place of the ones they keep killing."

Next month the first captive bred-and-born manatees, named Sunrise and Savannah, will be released into the Homosassa River.

The Seaquarium's newest manatee has no name. Dr. White said it was too soon for that. It's a lesson he's learned over the years—if you name them right away, it hurts even more to watch them die.

A loud cry for the state's wild panther Septembers, 1988

Last summer, in a pine hammock north of the Big Cypress Swamp, a rare Florida panther was released to the wild.

The big charcoal cat, known as No. 20, had been hit by a pickup, rescued and nursed back to health. To those of us who watched it dash into the wilderness, the animal looked awesomely fit and unconquerable.

But two weeks ago, the radio collar around No. 20's neck emitted an alarm from a device known as a mortality switch. The signal meant that the panther had not moved its head in several hours. No. 20 lay dead in the scrub.

Experts were deeply worried. Within days, three wild panthers would die from a population of only a few dozen. Another captive animal would die of liver disease. Tom Logan of the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission: "When you're dealing with low numbers to start with, any loss makes you pucker up a bit."

The deadly streak began in mid-June, when the only breeding female in Everglades National Park was found lifeless. Panther No. 15 had recently given birth, but the kittens were missing. It is believed they were killed by a predator, possibly a male panther.

A necropsy noted wounds on the female's forearms, but the cause of death remains unknown.

Another collared panther was struck by a car near Homestead and suffered a severely broken leg. A juvenile found starving on an island near Shark River was flown to Gainesville for emergency treatment. Both cats are recovering, but it is not certain when, or if, they can be safely freed again.

Outside the park, August was the killer month. No. 24, a 126-pound male that roamed Highlands County, died for reasons that will never be known. A faulty mortality switch on its collar prevented biologists from finding the body before it decomposed.

Days later, another young male cat, No. 25, died near Alligator Alley after being badly bitten in a fight with another panther. The wounds resulted in a bacterial infection that raced fatally to the animal's heart.

Before the tests, though, state game officials wondered if it could be more than grim coincidence that so many panthers were dying in such a short time. "A very bad week," said biologist Sonny Bass. Experts speculated about a mystery virus.

So far, there is no evidence of it. Tom Logan believes a combination of things contributed to the death of No. 20 near Immokalee. The animal had a heart murmur, first diagnosed after the truck accident. While in captivity, the cat also broke all its canine teeth, which veterinarians painstakingly recapped before its release.

But the dental caps came off in the wild, making it difficult for the panther to take large prey such as deer and wild hogs. No. 20 had lost 33 pounds in the months before it died.

The deaths have rekindled the debate over the state's radio tracking program, with critics suggesting that the collars inhibit breeding and possibly harm the cats.

Bass, Logan and others disagree. Radio telemetry has enabled rescuers to locate several panthers that had been struck by cars and would have died without help. As for the mating cycles, biologists have tracked one family of collared cats through three prolific generations.

Already in peril, the panther's future would seem especially bleak after such a bad summer: six animals (four dead, two injured) removed from a total wild population that might not exceed 30.

Yet state biologists are not ready to panic. Far-ranging and fiercely territorial, the panther is subject to a natural mortality, even among younger animals. When two cats meet and battle in the wild, there is nothing that man can do.

"These losses appear to be tragic," Tom Logan says, "but they really are a part of what goes on."

Where there is death in the Big Cypress, there is also hope for life. Panther watchers are currently tracking three separate litters of healthy kittens—and hoping that enough of them will survive to carry on the species.

Watering down of rules throws sharks to wolves December 24, 1992

One of the great indoor sports for Floridians is browsing our souvenir shops, to see what tourists are buying.

Once I found a shark embryo in a jar. No joke: A store in Key West had an entire shelf of real shark embryos, bottled like dill pickles. This was promoted as a clever memento of one's tropical vacation.

These days you won't find so many baby sharks, on land or sea. We've done quite a job of slaughtering them.

Some of the killing occurs in the name of sport, because shark are fine game fish. Ernest Hemingway sometimes machine-gunned his initials into their heads. As a kid, I killed a few myself, though not so exuberantly.

In those days we never dreamed the ocean would run out of sharks, but that's what is happening. The big money is in the fins, which are sold in Asia for expensive sharkfin soup.

It's an obscene reason to annihilate the planet's most important wild predator. Without sharks, the complex ecology of the sea will go haywire. This year Florida adopted a good law stopping commercial shark fishing within the three-mile state waters. It also limited the sharks taken by recreational anglers to one per day. (Some days, you'd be lucky to see that many.)

The U.S. government became so alarmed by the decline of sharks that it proposed similar restrictions in national waters, up to 200 miles offshore. It also sought to ban the barbaric practice of "finning"—hacking the fins off live sharks and tossing their maimed bodies overboard.

Weeks before the shark rules were to become law, a campaigning-President Bush announced a 9o-day moratorium on all new federal regulations. Now, with the election over, the National Marine Fisheries Service has presented a revised shark plan, which goes into effect in January. It's not nearly as tough as the original.

"An unmitigated disaster," says Dr. Sam Gruber, a University of Miami biologist who's been studying sharks since 1960.

Though live finning is outlawed, the new guidelines still allow commercial fishermen to take 2,436 metric tons of coastal sharks annually—lemon, bull, tiger, nurse and several other species. Each recreational boat can kill four.

"It's a joke," says Gruber. "It legalizes the wholesale slaughter of these things, for no reason."

The fisheries service insists the regulations will reduce the harvest enough that shark populations will resurge. Some marine biologists are skeptical. Unlike most fish, sharks take years to mature, and reproduce in small numbers. It worked for 4 million centuries, but not so well in the last decade.

Gruber has watched the change. In 1986, he began studying the life cycles of 140 lemon sharks in a secluded bight near No Name Key. The next year, only 90 of the sharks remained. By 1989, all were gone.

Divers and charter captains report similar observations along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Some commercial boats have gone out of business or moved to North Carolina, where sharks migrate in concentrations along the continental shelf.

Sure, sharks have a PR problem. Bumblebees kill more humans, but sharks get the bad press. And TV is always a sucker for dockside footage of a dead Great White, rotting ferociously in the sun.

Scary or not, sharks play a critical role in keeping the seas bountiful. It's not easy to kill off a creature that's survived 400 million years, but we've found a way. The rich folk do like their soup.

Meanwhile, I'm steering clear of tourist shops, in case somebody gets the bright idea for manatee steak.

A regular at saloon, popularity killed her April 6, 1995

"El Presidente" died last week. Bullet in the head.

Those who loved her might have loved her too well.

El Presidente was an alligator who lived by the Last Chance Saloon in Florida City. She was eight feet long, half-blind, a favorite with bar patrons.

They thought she was a male, hence the nickname. Attempts at gender verification were deemed unwise.

Laura Dryer, who runs the Last Chance, says El Presidente was a fixture for 12 years. Never bothered anybody but the garfish.

Wildlife officers say she had become a threat because people came to feed her in the canal, which flanks busy U.S. 1. They feared a tourist or small child would tumble down the bank and get chomped.

Two citizen complaints were filed with the state Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. Lawmen visited the scene.The verdict: El Presidente had to go.

"It met every criteria for a dangerous nuisance alligator," says Todd Hardwick, the man assigned to the capture. "It was 10 feet from U.S. 1, and a few feet from a bar where people were drinking."

One-eyed alligators and bleary-eyed partiers probably ought not to commingle, but through the years El Presidente and her fond admirers had no problems.

However, once branded a "nuisance," she was doomed. In gator-rich Florida, only the small ones are relocated. The large ones are harvested, because transfers are costly and often fruitless.

Recently a beloved alligator named Grandpa, in a rare clemency, was moved from Big Pine Key to Homosassa Springs. Bitten and abused by resident gators, Grandpa soon died.

So El Presidente received the customary sentence: death.

Hardwick, well-known capturer and rescuer of wild critters, holds the state trapper license for Dade and Monroe. He and two assistants got the call March 30 from Game and Fish.

Snagged with a fishing rod, El Presidente proved more manageable than her fans at the Last Chance. "They were ready to lynch me," Hardwick says.

Game officers prevented Dryer and others from blocking the capture. Mouth taped, the gator was hauled away and quickly killed with a .22. In this way, 4,632 nuisance gators were taken last year. The sale of the skin, at a state auction, is the trapper's fee.

Laura Dryer is heartsick and angry about El Presidente. "There was no justification for them to pull it out of the water and shoot it!"

Says Lt. Jeff Ardelean of Game and Fish: "They signed its death warrant by feeding it."

Indeed, El Presidente was one well-nourished saurian. At her death, she weighed 270 pounds. "Obese," says Hardwick. "The fattest eight-foot-four alligator we ever saw."

The girth of her tail was a Limbaughesque 32 inches, compared to the usual 18 or 19 inches of a gator that length.

Dryer says she didn't see throngs of people feeding El Presidente. She said the canal is teeming with fish, turtles and other natural cuisine upon which the gator gorged, though it's possible that customers donated high-calorie table scraps.

Inside the Last Chance Saloon, black armbands are worn in El Presidente's memory. Mourners don T-shirts denouncing the state: "Environmentally Protected, My Ass." There's even talk of a motorcycle run, to protest the killing.

Because of death threats, Todd Hardwick's house was put under police watch. Unaccustomed to the role of villain, he says he truly understands why people are upset.

It's easy to become attached to animals, even a crusty one-eyed alligator. Sadly, in these risky relationships, it's usually the reptile who winds up getting hurt.

Wildlife losing their homes as we build ours December 12, 1996

One day late in November, travelers on U.S. 27 in western Broward County saw an unusual sight: a wild bobcat walking dazed in broad daylight along the busy highway.

Usually the cats are nocturnal, shying from human activity. They are especially unfond of speeding automobiles.

A concerned motorist reported the animal to the Wildlife Care Center in Fort Lauderdale. The center immediately sent its ambulance and volunteers.

When they arrived at the area, just north of the Dade line, they found no sign of the cat. But after a brief search they spotted it hiding in brushy cover, not far from a cleared construction site.

The animal was weak, and put up no struggle. It died in the ambulance racing back to the Wildlife Care Center.

Rescuers had a sad mystery on their hands: an adult male bobcat about 2 years old, which should have been in its physical prime. No signs of trauma—the cat hadn't been shot or struck by a car, or mauled by another animal.

A necropsy was performed by the center's veterinarian, Dr. Deb Anderson. She found no fractures, no internal injuries, no disease in the organs.

What she did find was a shockingly emaciated animal with white gums and not an ounce of body fat. The young bobcat was all skin and bones. It had starved to death.

Starved, on the edge of the Everglades. How?

They're paving the edge of the Everglades, in case you hadn't noticed. The corridor from Southwest Broward through Northwest Dade has become bulldozer heaven.

It's the final horizon before the dikes, the last open mecca in which to slap up crowded subdivisions with fanciful names such as Big Sky North and Bluegrass Lakes. Naturally, politicians are rubber-stamping these monstrosities as fast as possible.

For humans, overdevelopment means your kids are shoehorned into classrooms and you're stuck behind dump trucks every morning on I-75. For wildlife, the inconveniences are more perilous.

Unlike scrappy opossums and raccoons, bobcats don't adapt to human encroachment—they flee from it. In fact they're so reclusive that a person could spend a lifetime in Florida and never lay eyes on one.

The cats aren't listed as endangered, but they've been pushed so far away that they're rarely encountered. Of 12,000 animals brought to the wildlife center this year, only four were bobcats.

And only one arrived dead of starvation a few days before Thanksgiving, another small casualty of "progress."

Like the much larger panther, bobcats are fiercely territorial. If a young male wanders into an older cat's range, the younger animal is attacked and sometimes killed.

Imagine what happens when one of them suddenly loses its home to machines; when the woods where it hunts small mammals and dens its kittens are flattened to moonscape.

The cat can't run east because east got paved. Can't go west because it's mostly water. Can't go north or south without battling other bobcats for a sparse, shrinking habitat.

Dr. Anderson believes the male found along U.S. 27 chose to hang tough, refusing to abandon his home range. He spent his final days running on magnificent guts and desperation, hunting himself to exhaustion in a barren future suburb of Miramar or Pembroke Pines.

Soon, on the same ground that cat and its ancestors once roamed, there will be a new condo clubhouse or outlet shops, or perhaps a multiplex cinema.

And the parking lots will fill with avid newcomers who won't know about the small wild tracks that got buried under all that greed.

'97 is already a mean season for wildlife May 25, 1997

A few days ago, a man in Key Largo took half a raw chicken and stuck it on a big triple-barbed hook. The hook was attached to a heavy nylon rope, which was reinforced with a steel cable leader.

The man lobbed the hooked chicken into a canal and began to wait. This is exactly how a poacher would do it—"a classic set-hook for crocodilians," said reptile expert Todd Hardwick, who later was called to the scene.

Before long, something swam along and ate the man's bait. It was a male North American crocodile measuring 9 feet, 10 inches and weighing about 350 pounds.

The animal was one of a pair that lived in the waterway, not far from the John Pennekamp state park. This species has been fighting back from the edge of extinction, and South Florida is the only place in the world where it lives.

More timid than alligators, these crocs are not known to attack humans. The big one that swallowed the baited chicken had long ago been tagged by a biologist named Paul Moler, who works for the state. Moler has spent years trying to save Florida's crocodiles.

This one was No. 050358. Moler had marked it after it emerged from the nest on Aug. 9, 1982, at the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge in North Key Largo.

Its life ended only a few miles away, under a dock, where it thrashed to death on the end of a rope. Its insides were torn to shreds.

Somebody in the neighborhood spotted the carcass and called authorities, because killing crocodiles is highly illegal. Nobody has been arrested yet.

A man interviewed by wildlife officers said he was innocently fishing when the croc grabbed his bait. Wow! Fishing with a chicken on a steel cable—they must grow some damn big snappers in that canal.

It continues to be a brutal season for Florida wildlife, with jerks running amok. In March, a 10-ton Minke whale died near Big Pine Key after being shot five times by unknown persons.

Who knows why anyone would take target practice on such a harmless and elegant creature, but you can bet on a pathetic combination of boredom and stupidity. Bullets from two separate guns were removed from the dead whale.

Then, from the purely vicious to the purely greedy:

Five young sports from Hialeah were arrested two weeks ago in Biscayne National Park. They carried no fishing licenses, but had a boatload of illegal booty, including undersize and out-of-season lobster, 458 queen conchs and the remains of a rare loggerhead turtle.

The goons who butchered the turtle could get 12 to 18 months in a federal prison. A park ranger found the animal's flippers while searching the boat.

Days later, several men were busted for illegal spearfishing around Dinner Key and Government Cut.You know you've found paradise when you can poach lobsters within wading distance of the Miami skyline.

Some judges go easy on wildlife violators, and others are as tough as the law allows. Unfortunately, the maximum fines are too low and the maximum jail sentences are too light for the crime, which is nothing short of robbery.

A few neighbors on that canal in Key Largo said they were glad the croc was gone. They said they feel safer now.

That's almost understandable—it was a large, scary-looking critter. The fact it hadn't hurt anyone didn't matter. Fear is fear.

Still, some folks would like their kids one day to see a loggerhead turtle in the Atlantic, or even a wild crocodile in Florida Bay.

That No. 050358 held on for almost 15 years is a small miracle of nature, considering all the numbskulls and bandits it had to elude.

Turtle's slaying shows we need more Cousteaus June 29, 1997

Eighty-seven years is a long time, but not long enough for Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Unfortunately, he died before his work was done.

Although his ardent writings and dazzling photography awakened millions to the world underwater, he couldn't reach everybody.

Last weekend in Marathon, a little girl named Michelle was fishing from a motel dock when she accidentally snagged a sea turtle. The child called to family members, who hurried over to investigate the commotion.

You needn't be a student of Cousteau documentaries to know that sea turtles in Florida and around the world are in danger of being wiped out. The humane response would have been to unhook the animal and let it swim away.

That's what one of the girl's relatives originally claimed they'd done. But that isn't what actually happened.

According to the Florida Marine Patrol, one of the family members grabbed a spear gun and shot the turtle as it struggled on the end of the fishing line.

Then, witnesses say, the family carried it to their boat and sped off. Other tourists, infuriated, notified authorities.

When the Coast Guard intercepted the boat in Florida Bay, officers found the deck smeared with blood, but no turtle. On shore, more blood was found in a garbage can. Samples were collected for evidence.

Killing turtles is a serious crime. The Marine Patrol has charged Rene Robinson, Carlos Robinson and Ricardo Robinson, of Miami. The federal government also might prosecute.

Officers say Rene Robinson admitted spearing the turtle and stashing it in the garbage. When another relative informed him that keeping turtles was illegal, the family allegedly decided to dump the carcass offshore.

It was quite a gruesome little tableau to unfold on a Sunday evening in a resort area, the singular attraction of which is, ironically, its unique tropical sea life.

People travel to South Florida from all over the planet to see in person what they've seen only in books or on television—the soaring dolphins, the cruising sharks, the whole teeming kaleidoscope of the coral reefs.

They certainly don't come to see a helpless creature gored by some troglodyte with a spear gun.

Killing will happen as long as there's life underwater. Sea turtles and other endangered species are regularly taken, but often it's done because people are poor and hungry—not because they're bored on their vacation.

What took place in the Keys wouldn't have surprised Jacques Cousteau, though it would have saddened him. He spent a lifetime crusading against the foolhardy and wanton pillage of lakes, rivers and seas.

He tried to teach the difference between wise harvest and reckless butchery, and tried to show why all living things beneath the water's surface, from the regal blue whale to the unglamorous toadfish, have value far beyond the dollar.

It wasn't easy to open this remote new world, or to make outsiders share his awe. In the 19405 Cousteau helped invent the first aqualung, enabling humans to breathe underwater. Thus scuba was born, and soon the oceans had a political constituency.

Judging by the millions who dive and snorkel for the beauty, and by the millions more who flock to the Seaquarium and other marine exhibits, Cousteau's legacy is phenomenal.

Largely because of his pioneering, most who are lucky enough to see a wild sea turtle don't feel an impulse to spear it. Rather, they feel what they ought to feel, what their children feel: curiosity and wonderment.

Others feel nothing, yet Cousteau never gave up trying to enlighten them. He could have used another 87 years.

Same old song: Greed drowns another species December 28, 1997

It's a tiny wisp of a bird, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow. You probably won't even notice after it's gone.

When the floodgates crank open at a dike west of Miami, millions of gallons of water will surge south toward a remote section of Everglades

National Park, home to one of the endangered sparrow's last breeding colonies.

The birds, which nest in grasses close to the ground, could be flooded out. Many experts believe the colony is unlikely to survive.

Everglades water is watched closely by government agencies. This year the levels are high again because of abundant rain. That's usually good for birds and wildlife, but not always. This year it's definitely not so good for the Cape Sable seaside sparrow.

There's so much water in the Everglades that the folks in charge need to flush the overflow someplace. If they send it to the park's eastern marshes, it might damage some homes that were built there.

So instead they're preparing to send the water farther west, where it could wash out a few hundred olive-colored songbirds, birds so rare that most Floridians have never laid eyes on them.

Pumping, due to start last week, was postponed because of publicity. A hard rain could force the issue, a decision to be made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District.

Officials in those agencies aren't happy about annihilating the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, but they say they've got few options. They say they're not allowed to flood private property.

That would be property known as the 81/2 Square Mile Area, notable as one of the only sites west of the Everglades levee where houses went up—about 350 of them. Why that was permitted to happen is no mystery. Somebody was trying to make money.

Now, whenever there's heavy rainfall, the residents of the 8 1/2 Square Mile Area get flooded. That's because they live in a swamp, and swamps flood; it literally comes with the territory. And when flooding occurs, the folks who live out there complain. Who wouldn't?

Allowing houses to be built on the wet side of a levee wasn't the most stupid thing Dade County politicians have ever done, but it's close. The price of that stupidity might well be the extermination of another species.

All that overflow water is being aimed away from the misbegotten houses in the 81/2 Square Mile Area, and straight toward the nesting grounds of the Cape Sable seasides. Biologists say this will be the fourth consecutive season that the sparrows cannot breed in the western part of the park, leaving only about 270 there alive.

Other colonies occupy eastern marshes, but because of water diversion practices, those areas will soon be too dry for nesting. Experts believe it won't be long before all the birds die off.

The story is a bleak echo. The last U.S. bird species to become extinct was another Florida sparrow, the dusky seaside. Once thriving in wetlands near the Kennedy Space Center, the dusky was done in by overdevelopment and pesticides.

Everglades National Park is supposed to offer sanctuary from such man-made threats. Indeed, birds living within the park's vast boundaries don't see many bulldozers or crop dusters.

Water is a more inescapable presence. The stuff that could drown out the Cape Sable seaside sparrows will be pumped into the park from conservation areas to the north. Efforts to redistribute the flow more evenly will probably come too late to save the birds.

A study is being done to help decide whether all the houses and lots in the 81/2 Square Mile Area should be repurchased and returned to a natural state. In the meantime, if it comes to a policy choice between soaking a bird and soaking somebody's carpet, the birds will probably lose.

Too bad they can't learn to build their nests in taller grass.

Too bad we can't learn not to build our subdivisions in swamps.