In Dr No, when James Bond is being given the assignment to close out the case of the missing Strangways, a detail from the last case that the Station Head of Jamaica had been working on before his disappearance catches 007’s interest. The Chief of Staff had referred to it as “Only that damned business about the birds.”
The Audubon Society had been making noise in Washington, even getting the British Ambassador involved, which was how the case came to the attention of the Secret Service. Bond presses for more information. Tanner relates:
“It seems there’s a bird called a Roseate Spoonbill. There’s a coloured photograph of it in here. Looks like a sort of pink stork with an ugly flat bill which it uses for digging for food in the mud. Not many years ago these birds were dying out. Just before the war there were only a few hundred left in the world, mostly in Florida and thereabouts. Then somebody reported a colony of them on an island called Crab Key between Jamaica and Cuba. It’s British territory-a dependency of Jamaica. Used to be a guano island, but the quality of the guano was too low for the cost of digging it. When the birds were found there, it had been uninhabited for about fifty years. The Audubon people went there and ended up by leasing a corner as a sanctuary for these spoonbills.
The Chief of Staff goes on to relate that the Island of Crab Key was then bought by a certain Dr No, with the stipulation that the sanctuary not be disturbed. A few suspicious incidents resulting the deaths of the Wardens and of a couple of members of the Audubon really caused things to heat up. But Strangways had not reported back anything in his investigation prior to his disappearance.
