What's Killing the Key Deer? From land use to traffic, the deck
is being stacked against this endangered species Roger Di
Silvestro When the rains came that day to palm-shrouded Big Pine
Key, the bulldozers were already lined up to go to work, cutting
a road across this second-largest of the islands that make up
the Florida Keys. At the same time, a phone was ringing in the
Atlanta office of attorney David White, who was working on cases
involving the National Wildlife Federation and the Florida
Wildlife Federation. "I got the call at 8 a.m.," he says. "By 2
p.m. I was in Miami pulling a judge away from a federal cocaine
case." By then, White had been joined by another Federation
attorney, Henry Morgenstern. What he and Morgenstern wanted from
the judge was an injunction to stop the road, which would bring
heavy traffic into the National Key Deer Refuge, home to a
diminutive, endangered subspecies of white-tailed deer unique to
the Keys. Traffic on roads penetrating deer habitat already was
killing dozens of