For the Birds

By the time the boat docks, the weather is bird-watching perfect: dripping rain, rising wind, unrelieved gloom. In the face of an approaching front, the migrating birds have come to ground, and as the birders charge into Fort Jefferson and onto its parade grounds, they expect a bonanza. They get it.

"Hooded warbler on the pathway!" yells Cunningham.
"Eastern kingbird! Summer tanager!" calls Mumford.
"Got a black and white in the oak at two o'clock!"
"White-eyed vireo! In the geiger tree, indigo bunting!"
The visual riot is on.

Warblers in brilliant yellows and oranges flit through the branches of the gnarled buttonwood trees or hop about almost tamely on the ground, as the birders split off into smaller groups to chase down the bounty before them. Hummingbirds and bright scarlet tanagers in the low trees, merlins and kestrels overhead, ovenbirds and Louisiana water thrushes by the fort's fountain, rose-breasted grosbeaks in the gumbo-limbo A even the long-listed veterans are in danger of both whiplash and muscle-aching "warbler neck" as they whirl to keep up. "It's heaven on earth, and this is only average so far," gushes Cunningham. "It gets better."

Wes Biggs, of course, has one eye on the birds while the other searches out Howard Langridge. "Whadya get?" Biggs asks when he finds him.

Langridge offers his rival a brief, enigmatic smile, then shakes his head.
"Thank God," sighs Biggs. He is still only three behind.
That afternoon the leading edge of a cold front kicks off an earth-rattling thunderstorm featuring two hours of slashing, horizontal rain and wind gusts of more than 45 miles an hour that overpower the anchors of a dozen moored sailboats, herding them together like frightened gulls. Even the most dedicated birders seek shelter.

But in the daylong drizzle that follows, the birds are active, foraging for insects and seeds that will fuel their journey northward, and so are the birders. After lunch the Yankee Freedom hauls the group to Loggerhead Key, two and a half miles away, where thick stands of Australian pine and sea grape trees provide a different type of habitat, and different birds.

Orchard oriole!
Kentucky warbler!
Great crested flycatcher!

Later, back on Garden Key, as the rain continues, the fort's second deck offers the perfect walkway for those who refuse to relinquish a moment of daylight birding but who have run out of dry clothes. Walking about the half-mile-round fort, spectators are at treetop level as redstarts and prothonotary warblers dart out and back, barn swallows swoop in over the parade grounds, and a pair of yellow-billed cuckoos huddle in the midstory of a buttonwood, almost out of sight.

One of the first visitors to note the abundance of avifauna on the islands was Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Le centsn, who stopped by in 1513 and named the cluster of seven coral reefs Las Tortugas (the Turtles) because of the many shelled reptiles he found there. One of the first to begin listing the abundance of species here was John James Audubon, who sailed over to what he called "these inhospitable isles" from Key West in May 1832.

Through the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth centuries, the Tortugas were a shipwreck destination in waiting. And many occurred there, as British and Spanish vessels sailed through an area made treacherous by both pirates and reefs. In 1825, three years after Florida became a U.S. territory, a lighthouse was built on Garden Key, and soon after that the U.S. War Department recognized the strategic importance of controlling the Tortugas to protect the growing sea trade between the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic.

Construction of Fort Jefferson began in 1846, with slave labor. Its eight-foot-thick walls stand fifty feet high and include three tiers designed to hold 450 guns and a garrison of 1500 men. But although work continued for 30 years, what was once called "the Gibraltar of the Gulf," planned as the largest in a series of coastal fortifications envisioned in the early 1800s, was never completed. Federal troops occupied the fort during the Civil War, but did little except begin building quarters for themselves and their officers. After the Civil War ended and the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, some work on the fort was taken up by imprisoned Union deserters. But by then the sands beneath the fort had begun to shift and the walls had started to crack, and the Army finally abandoned Fort Jefferson in 1874 after a punishing hurricane and an outbreak of yellow fever.

The red-brick fort's most famous resident was Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, the Maryland physician who set the broken leg of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. After being convicted of complicity in the president's murder, Mudd was sentenced to life in prison. For four years Mudd was held in a dank corner cell until he was pardoned in 1869 for his work in fighting a yellow fever epidemic.