Cultural Importance
The threat to many threatened species but especially the woodrat and the cotton mouse generated broad interest in the Florida keys in the 1980s, with many environmental groups being formed. Anna Dagny Johnson (1918-2003), a well-known environmentalist, led efforts by the Upper Keys Citizens Association and the Izaak Walton League to stop development around North Key Largo; the Florida Division of Recreation and Parks honored her by naming the Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park for her, a year before she died.
The rat's habit of building large nests ("4ft by 6ft homes") was seen as proof that "even wildlife in Florida want enormous homes." Novelist Lydia Millet paid homage to the woodrat in her 2008 novel How the Dead Dream, a story of a young real estate developer from Los Angeles who, after some personal turmoil, takes an obsessive interest in vanishing species. A 1997 collection of poetry and prose by a writers cooperative from Key West features a poem ("The Place We Live" by Robin Orlandi) in which the woodrat is mentioned as one of three "endangered native species," alongside the Key deer and the Stock Island Snail, Orthalicus reses reses.
Read more about this topic: Key Largo Woodrat
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