Orlando Sentinel Looks Back on Environmental Issues in Central Florida

The Florida Audubon Society, the state’s first environmental organization and one of its most enduring and influential conservation groups, formed at a lakeside home in Maitland in March of 1900 with a pledge to protect birds in danger of extinction because their feathers were favored in women’s fashion.

Most of the influential 15 men and women who gathered at the home of Clara and Louis Dommerich came to Central Florida to escape northern winters, grow oranges and watch birds, a pastime they treasured, said Leslie Kemp Poole, an environmental historian who teaches environmental studies at Rollins College in Winter Park.

“They were the original snowbirds,” she said of the founders.

They were alarmed that flamingos, great blue herons, roseate spoonbills and other birds with colorful feathers were hunted for plumage or body parts to be used in high-fashion women’s hats, then a $17 million industry.

The Carolina parakeet, once common in Florida, was driven to extinction.

Poole, who detailed the Florida Audubon Society’s beginnings for the Orange County History Center, said the founders joined a national call for action to stop the wholesale slaughter of Florida birds and noted that one of its most strident advocates was famous for shaming anyone she found wearing a bird-plumed hat.

“As the century progressed, Audubon’s interests would expand to protecting and preserving all of the state’s complex and intricate flora and fauna and ecosystems – becoming the Audubon we know today,” Poole wrote.

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