Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing Bird

Florida Historical Society Stetson Kennedy Award

A portrait of a species on the brink

The only bird species that lives exclusively in Florida, the Florida scrub-jay was once common across the peninsula. But as development over the last 100 years reduced the habitat on which the bird depends from 39 counties to three, the species became endangered. With a writer’s eye and an explorer’s spirit, Mark Walters travels the state to report on the natural history and current predicament of Florida’s ...