Flamingo — Plume Hunting, Settlement and the Edge of Florida Bay
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Flamingo was a remote settlement long before it became a park visitor centre. Fishing, hunting and small-scale livelihoods operated at the edge of Florida Bay.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plume hunting devastated populations of egrets and other birds whose feathers were sold for fashion. Conservation groups hired wardens to enforce new protections. Guy Bradley, a local bird warden, was killed in 1905 during a confrontation connected with plume hunting.
The story shows how wildlife protection changed from moral appeal to enforcement. Birds became valuable alive rather than as commodities.
Flamingo also reminds visitors that the Everglades contained working communities. National-park creation did not protect an empty wilderness; it changed the legal and economic uses of a populated coastal landscape.