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Real Florida

Once plundered, now priceless

About a century ago, Tampa Bay's roseate spoonbills were decimated for their colorful plumes. Today, they are nesting again and spotting one is something to treasure.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published June 5, 2005

[Times photos: John Pendygraft]

The vivid plumes of the roseate spoonbills were as valuable as gold in the late 19th century. The feathers were used for women’s hats.

	Roseate spoonbills stopped nesting in Boca Ciega Bay more than a century ago. In recent years, they have been making a resurgence in the area.

ST. PETERSBURG - The old Frenchman must have adored the view at Dogleg Key. The old Frenchman, whom other plume hunters called Chevelier, loaded his shotgun and waited for the birds to return to the roost. He especially relished shooting roseate spoonbills. To him their gorgeous crimson feathers looked green - green as in money.

Chevelier, arguably the most notorious plume hunter who ever drew breath in North America, was the scourge of pretty birds from the Everglades to Tampa Bay. He even lived for a spell in southern Pinellas County, along wading-bird-infested Boca Ciega Bay. Frenchman Creek near today's Maximo Park is named after him.

Plume hunters sold feathers that stylish women in New York and in Paris wore on their hats beginning in the late 19th century. Chevelier and other hunters almost eliminated wading birds from Tampa and Boca Ciega bays.

Spoonbills, whose colorful feathers were as valuable as gold, suffered most of all.

In Tampa Bay, they stopped nesting in 1912 and did not raise young again for almost seven decades. In Boca Ciega Bay, the waterway separating St. Petersburg from its beaches, breeding spoonbills were last reported in 1881. By the time the plume trade was outlawed, about a century ago, it was nearly too late.

But now, in the 21st century, life is looking better for spoonbills hoping to raise a family.

Take that, Chevelier.

Ann Paul scans the mangroves with her binoculars. Paul, who works for the National Audubon Society, keeps track of 50,000 pairs of waterbirds on 80 islands in west-central Florida. Dogleg Key, near John's Pass in Boca Ciega Bay, is among those islands.

"There's one," she says. The spoonbill preens like a grande dame at a New Year's Eve ball. She is white and pink and gold. Her featherless head enjoys a green tint and a few sexy freckles. But it is that improbable Alice in Wonderland bill that provokes the double takes. Imagine two wooden mixing spoons clacking together.

As Paul watches, another spoonbill hops childishly from branch to branch toward mama bird. The new arrival, hatched weeks ago, is mostly white. The chick bobs its head ridiculously for attention. Mama ignores the "I want food NOW!" tantrum.

Two years ago, Ann Paul and her husband, Rich Paul, who was the manager of Audubon's Florida Coast Island Sanctuaries at the time, were doing their annual breeding bird survey of west-central Florida islands. They were flabbergasted to see a handful of nesting spoonbills in Boca Ciega Bay.

"When Rich and I saw we had nesting spoonbills in Boca Ciega Bay again it was a real cause for celebration," Ann Paul says. "I'm talking about a champagne moment."

A good time to kill was at dusk. A man with a shotgun and a skiff, hiding in the shadows, could make real money when the birds returned to their mangrove island roosts. When birds were breeding, when they were incubating eggs, the industrious plumer could even slay birds at high noon.

Nobody went to jail. It was perfectly legal.

In fact, almost everything in pioneer Florida was legal. If something moved, or even if it didn't move, likely it was harvested and sold. Loggers sawed down trees that were ancient when the first Europeans arrived in Florida. Miners scalped the land for phosphate as commercial hunters sold deer meat and bear-skin rugs.

Fancy ladies in northern cities adored those colorful feathered hats. An ounce of feathers was worth $20 in New York, the world headquarters for the millinery trade. A pair of spoonbill wings, typically turned into fans, fetched $7 at a time when most Floridians lived in poverty.

The New York ornithologist W.E.D. Scott wrote an account of his depressing visit to Boca Ciega Bay in the spring of 1887.

"I had been here six years before, and it fairly teemed with bird life then," he wrote in an ornithological journal, The Auk. "Every tree and bush on this large area contained at least one nest, and many contained from two to six or eight nests. A perfect cloud of birds was always to be seen hovering over the island in the spring and early summer months. . . . It was truly a wonderful sight, and I have never seen so many thousands of large birds together at any single point."

The Frenchman and his assistants took up residence at Maximo Point, near today's Sunshine Skyway bridge. Typically they would shoot birds and then process the feathers back at the shack.

"Only a few cormorants were to be seen," wrote Scott in his journal, ". . . and though I spent several hours looking over the various parts of the island, I found no other large birds breeding."

Scott tried to find out what had happened.

"I am told by persons living near, whom I have every reason to believe, that it took these men five breeding seasons to break up, by killing and frightening the birds away, this once incomparable breeding resort. Of course there were other plume hunters who aided in the slaughter, but the old Frenchman and his assistants are mainly responsible for the wanton destruction. . . .

"It is scarcely necessary to draw any conclusions or inferences. This great and growing evil speaks for itself."

Chevelier's first name was Jean, though sometimes he called himself Alfred. He also used the last name Lechevallier. "His name was shrouded in confusion, possibly the result of Cracker unfamiliarity with the French language," wrote Stuart B. McIver in his history of the plume trade, Death in the Everglades.

Born in Canada, Chevelier listed his trade as "taxidermist." He was considered a leading citizen in Florida. A bay in Everglades National Park bears his name. A defunct company in the Big Cypress that helped build the Tamiami Trail was named after Chevelier.

His name first showed up in Florida's public record on March 16, 1881. That day he paid a huge sum, $1,800, for 120 acres at Maximo Point in St. Petersburg. But he knew it was a good investment.

One of Chevelier's neighbors was John A. Bethell a founder of St. Petersburg. An accomplished hunter, Bethell shot bears, panthers and alligators on the peninsula for food. But he pronounced himself disgusted at Chevelier's venality.

"There were plume and song birds of every description that the Creator had placed here to beautify and adorn Man's Paradise," he wrote in History of Pinellas Peninsula in 1912, "but the lawless marauders just about destroyed everything that came in reach of their powder and lead.

"The worst scourge that ever came to Point Pinellas was one Chevelier, a Frenchman from Montreal Canada, who located just west of Point Maximo for the purpose of killing birds for their plumes, feathers and skins."

Two of Chevelier's assistants bragged about harvesting 11,000 plumes and 30,000 bird eggs in a single season. Their best day, during nesting season, was 1,000 plumes. They harvested the parent birds and left the chicks to perish in nests. He liked killing pelicans, and sometimes used their pouches for wallets.

Having wiped out Tampa Bay's bird population, Chevelier moved to the greener pastures of the Everglades.

He died in 1895, his reputation intact, about two decades before laws were passed to put an end to plume hunting.

Ann Paul is a 50ish woman with blond hair and skin burned by wind and sun. Her hands are scarred from encounters with a variety of birds, some she rescued from entanglement in discarded fishing lines, and some she captured for scientific purposes. She was born in Gainesville, educated at Cornell, and spends much of her time in a boat patrolling the bay.

Her favorite time is spring.

Spoonbills are mating.

"We don't know that much about their biology," she says, "but mostly the adult birds are looking each other over. They are dressed in their best finery - their feathers have the best color of the year. Spoonbills do a lot of what we call "skygazing.' They'll stare up at sky and open their bills wide. They are letting the rest of the world - spoonbills that might be flying overhead - know that they are spoonbills and available for mating."

At some point, amorous spoonbills take flight. They fly around an island in a high, tight spiral. People who have watched the phenomenon say it looks like the spoonbills are happy. Scientists loathe ascribing human emotions to birds so they simply say the reasons are a mystery.

Spoonbills at Boca Ciega build basket-sized stick nests about 12 feet up in the mangroves. A female will lay one to three eggs. Both parents take turns incubating. The eggs hatch about a month later. Both parents take turns foraging for food. Sometimes a spoonbill will fly 30 miles to find feeding grounds that are just right. A spoonbill feeds by touch in water about a foot deep, sweeping its bills to and fro, snapping up crabs and minnows. Then it returns to the nest and regurgitates food into the chick's bill.

Chicks are always hungry. They beg for food from dawn to dusk. Spoonbill parents look beautiful in the spring, but weary.

By 1920, Florida's spoonbill population had fallen to fewer than 30 pairs. Today there are 800 nesting pairs.

The largest nesting colony is found at Alafia Banks, in Hillsborough County, in Tampa Bay. Ann Paul watches over 300 nests.

The colony at Dogleg Key in Boca Ciega is more modest. In May she counted nine nesting pairs, up from six pairs in 2004.

"This is a good place for them," she says, studying the island through her binoculars. "They have chosen to raise their young in the right neighborhood. There are no opossums, raccoons or house cats to get at their nests. And no thugs to bother them."

Chevelier would adore the view. But probably for the wrong reason.

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

Death in the Everglades, by Stuart B. McIver, University Press of Florida.

Everglades: River of Grass, by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Pineapple Press.

Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida, by Mark Derr, University Press of Florida.

[Last modified June 2, 2005, 08:42:03]