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Birding Getaway: The Dry Tortugas

© P.C. Robinson

Sooner or later you’ll want to venture out in search of birds you’ll never see in your neighborhood. When you do, consider a birding tour.

Birding tours are offered to everywhere imaginable. Popular birding spots throughout the United States include Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Washington State. For the more adventurous, there are Ecuador, Belize and Costa Rica. The Galapagos Islands and Antarctica have become standard fare for U.S. birders within the last few years. Even Madagascar, the United Kingdom, India and Turkey draw visitors eager for something different.

Given these choices, however, you shouldn’t neglect the Dry Tortugas. This chain of tiny keys, located 68 nautical miles west of Key West, Florida, were first discovered by the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon in the early sixteenth century (“tortuga” means “sea turtle” in Spanish. Later explorers added the “dry” to warn visitors there are no fresh water sources on the islands).

Because of their strategic location in the turquoise waters of the Florida Straits, the United States began construction of a fort on Garden Key, the largest island in the chain, in the 1840s. Fort Jefferson was never used for defensive purposes, but did accommodate Confederate prisoners during the Civil War. Its most famous resident was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated John Wilkes Booth following Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Its most famous visitor was John James Audubon, who first visited the Tortugas in the 1830s. The fort was eventually abandoned in the late nineteenth century when the development of more powerful ordnance made its fortifications obsolete.

Today, the Dry Tortugas are more renowned as a national park and for the important role they play in the migration of birds between South America and the eastern United States. Every spring and fall thousands of birds make their way to the keys to rest and recuperate between continents. Unfortunately, the Dry Tortugas offer rest but little food and water. For an exhausted bird, the Dry Tortugas mean a struggle between life and death. Egrets perish for lack of food and cannibalizing is common. Warblers and sparrows are easy pickings for the stronger merlins and peregrine falcons.

Sometimes, birds don’t make it to land. On my recent trip, I found a male Common Yellowthroat warbler lifeless on the deck of our ferry. He had apparently died of exhaustion. At the same time I found him, a pack of exhausted American Redstarts flew by, just inches off the water’s four-foot swells.

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