DESTINATIONS

STUDIO SPOTLIGHT

OUR ISLAND RANKS 7TH; NEW YORK CITY IS NO. 1

Mallory Seaport Back To The Future

Dear Editor,

As the Key West cruise ship debate subsides into a normal, routine schedule of ship calls at Pier B, it is useful to revisit at least one early argument set forth by cruise ship opponents. Because Pier B is a private entity lawfully engaged in interstate and international commerce that benefits a significant portion of our economy, we can expect to see ships there indefinitely into the future.

Though that fact may rankle some, many others in Key West see it as a positive. Clearly, both sides in the issue can claim some measure of success -- an entirely uncommon phenomenon in our divided country.

The City of Key West, though enjoying over $1.5M per year in revenue from Pier B ships, can no longer claim to exercise supervision over operations at that facility. By falling for Safer Cleaner Ships’ (SCS) demand to reject last year’s compromise worked out between the city’s attorneys and Pier B owners, the city commission ensured that Pier B can no longer be considered an administrative part of the Port of Key West. That is the result of the misleading politics of SCS leaders. It is all the more regrettable because the mayor and some commissioners inexplicitly continue to bestow political power on SCS. Commissioners are so politically fearful of SCS that they reject the most benign and cordial invitations to attend traditional onboard plaque presentation ceremonies for the initial calls of new ships, even as they accept significant passenger fees from those same ships.

When the city breached the Outer Mole dockage agreement with the Navy, the Port of Key West was reduced to only one commercial pier – the historic Mallory Seaport.

Safer Cleaner Ships spokesmen promised voters that so-called “smaller, safer and cleaner” ships would flock to Key West, presumably docking at Mallory. We all know that was never true, and was one of their false flags. In a recent attempt to rally their dwindling base, leaders are publicly calling out Caribe Nautical as the architect of the continuing flow of ships to Pier B and the exclusion of smaller ships to Mallory. That accusation is designed to gull Key Westers and is completely ignorant of the facts.

Caribe Nautical has never been granted any authority to schedule or restrict ships into Key West. We are merely a clearinghouse for berth requests that can only be approved by Pier B or the city’s port director in the case of Mallory.

TripAdvisor has named Key West among the 10 most popular domestic visitor destinations in its 2023 Travelers’ Choice Best of the Best awards.

Key West ranks seventh on the roster of the United States’ domestic destinations. It is one of three Florida cities listed among Tripadvisor’s top 25, with Miami Beach ranked fifth and St. Augustine 19th. New York City claimed the No. 1 spot.

“Key West offers a laid-back and warm embrace to its visitors — an atmosphere and a welcome that continue to draw people from around the U.S. and the world to share that experience,” said Stacey Mitchell, director of the Florida Keys tourism council.

TripAdvisor’s awards listing praised Key West for its refreshingly slow pace, history as a haven for U.S. presidents and literary legends Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, exceptional diving and the kid-friendly Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center.

The awards are the highest honors bestowed by TripAdvisor, billed as the world’s largest travel guidance platform. Award winners are selected annually based on millions of reviews and opinions collected from travelers around the world.

More information is at tripadvisor.com/travelerschoice-destinations.

— Contributed

As a matter of fact, there have always been a small number of boutique ships that have called on Key West and wish to continue to do so. Inexplicably, SCS applied pressure on the commission to write and pass Resolution 22-073, effectively closing Mallory to all but the smallest possible of passenger vessels.

The resolution prohibits any ship from Mallory if there is a ship at Pier B unless the ship carries 500 or fewer persons. Trying to salvage credibility, SCS orchestrated that pointedly severe restriction after recognizing their fund-raising promise to control ships at Pier B had predictably dissipated.

Ironically, when the city diminished their own authority over the Port by passing the resolution, they canceled 22 scheduled port calls of the very same size ships that SCS professed they wanted to encourage in the nullified referenda of 2020. At that time, SCS professed to welcome any ship that carried 1,300 total persons or less. Those were indeed the “exclusive” ships that met their elitist gauge of desirably moneyed passengers.

I say, so be it. Let us return to those criteria and welcome to Mallory Seaport the smaller ships that carry fewer than 1,301 persons. As a ships’ agent, I assure you that change to City Resolution 22-073 would result in perhaps only about 20 ship calls per year at Mallory. That is a reasonable number even if there is a ship at Pier B.

Over the past two years, the City Commission has willfully presided over the demise of the historic Port of Key West. Therefore, I respectfully urge commissioners to reconsider their course and take back our historic port by amending the over-restrictive ship size criteria in Resolution 22073. Please restore the 200-year-old Mallory Seaport by allowing the very same ship sizes advocated by SCS in their overruled 2020 referendum. Also retract the self-defeating language that prohibits ships at Mallory if privately-owned Pier B has a ship alongside.

Who among our commissioners will step forward and champion such a courageous step back to the future?

Sincerely, John

E. Wells, Ships’ agent

... is a photographer, writer, and semi-professional birdwatcher. He has lived in Key West for more than 25 years and may no longer be employable in the real world. He is also executive director of the Florida Keys Audubon Society.

Red-shouldered hawks are the car alarms of the raptor world, always going off and making a racket for reasons unclear. At least, this is how it felt to me recently.

My wife and I just roadtripped up to north Florida for a friend’s epic birthday party. (Damn, Tracey Holst, you make 60 look good.) Afterward, my wife beelined back to Key West with a friend and I spent a couple days wandering around Florida backroads, working on a photo project.

I drove about 2,500 miles, by rough estimation, and I wasn’t really looking for birds. But every third or fourth time I got out of the truck, I’d hear a red-shouldered hawk screaming its fool head off, a loud kee-YA, kee-YA, kee-YA, that comes off as exactly the kind of sound you expect a hawk to make if you were making up the call from your imagination. (The most straight- from-central-casting raptor call is the red-tailed hawk, which is so much what you expect to hear from a bird of prey that it is often used to dub the call of the bald eagle, because the real-life bald eagle call sounds kind of wussy.)

Winter is apparently breeding season for red-shouldered hawks in Florida. This time of year they could be building nests or sitting on eggs. It’s still a little early for hatching. But whenever I heard a red-shoulder going off on this trip, I would look around for a predator like a crow, or another hawk, or an owl, and there was nothing to be seen.

There’s that line from “To Kill A Mockingbird” when Miss Maudie, the housekeeper, says it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird because “they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.” Which maybe is what’s been going on with the red-shoulders, though I think maybe they weren’t singing their hearts out for us, but just for the hell of it. Maybe their singing, like opera or Tori Amos, is an acquired taste.

Often, it feels if you try to generalize about birdlife in Florida, the Keys end up requiring an asterisk. (Actually, most times, if you try to generalize about anything in Florida, the Keys end up requiring an asterisk.) But the red-shouldered hawk mostly evades that asterisk, as they are pretty common in the Keys. South Florida actually has its own subspecies of red-shouldered hawks, Buteo lineatus extimus, which is paler and smaller than other red-shoulders.

& A LOT OF REDSHOULDERED HAWKS

I see them pretty regularly in Big Pine, Big Torch and the backcountry islands. The Florida population doesn’t migrate, which makes them the one hawk that you can reliably find in the Keys year-round.

The one place they are rare? Key West.

I’m not sure why they eschew Key West proper. Red-shoulders are known to breed in suburban and urbanized areas, sometimes nesting as close as 6 feet from a building and 3 feet from a highway.

In one species account I read from 1930, the author described all the various ways he went about trying to disturb red-shoulders from their nests.

“After the bird has deposited her full set (of eggs) she is always found on the nest, and rarely slips off until the tree is smartly rapped, or loud shouts are given, or sticks thrown up at the nest.

“She is often a close sitter and even this does not seem to bother her. I have thrown sticks and had them strike the nest only to have her flit up, and again settle upon the eggs. Often after rapping you are forced to ascend, and then sometimes she leaves the nest softly as an owl, but more often emits wild piercing screams. I once went up to a nest on a windy day and touched the bird’s tail once and still she remained. The second time she dashed off like a bullet,” wrote Donald J. Nicholson in the Wilson Bulletin, one of the premier ornithological journals of the era (and today).

“One day I visited five nests, and the first bird carried away my cap in her talons and struck me such a severe blow that it gave me a bad headache, and left a scratch on my forehead. At two more nests I was attacked and struck upon the head. Many other times this has happened.

“This bird coming swiftly as an arrow directly for your head, screaming wildly, gives a timid soul the shivers, and unless you wildly wave your arms and shout. most likely she will give you a stiff blow that will put fear into you, and respect for their bravery,” Nicholson continued.

Ornithological methods have changed since then, and just to be clear, harassing a bird like that is absolutely wrong in modern times, and was pretty wrong then. Also illegal. But it does go to show that red-shoulders are no shrinking violets, and not shy of humanity. Which makes you think they could thrive in Key West, especially with the seemingly neverending supply of doves, pigeons, free-roaming poultry, and young iguanas. But no. They decline to breed here.

Which is not to say I’ve never seen a redshoulder in Key West. I saw one from a boat in Key West Harbor once, circling slowly in the breeze, the translucent panels at the outer edges of the bird’s wing glowing when it was backlit.

And once, in what was perhaps my favorite sighting of a red-shouldered hawk ever, I saw one perched in the top of the giant kapok tree in front of the Harvey Government Center at the corner of Truman Avenue and White Street. I was pumping gas at the Dion’s when I saw it. I grabbed my binoculars at first, then caught a few frames with my camera. Despite all the rumbling trucks and honking scooters and incoming airliners, it stayed for quite a while, slowly surveying the world below, giving no clue about what it found to be unsuitable about this last little bit of old Florida.