Saving starving manatees: Can Florida solve a man-made crisis?
Wildlife specialist Wayne Hartley took notes with a detective’s professional air, a dead manatee at his feet. He nodded his head. Jotted some more.
When he got home, the scribblings were nonsense. “I was upset,” explains the former Army Ranger. Alone in his yard, he threw his cap into the dust. And wept.
That manatee, after all, was an old friend.
Mr. Hartley, who works for the Save the Manatees Club, first began a daily census of manatees in 1981. At the time, there were only around 36 of the aquatic mammals in Blue Spring State Park, a manatee refuge south of where the St. Johns River, one of the laziest in the world, widens out near the old steamboat town of Palatka, Florida.
