[Music] Gulf winds blow through canopy roads all the way to Thomasville.

Native names written on the land echo through the red clay hills.

Where the scent of longleaf Florida pine Where the scent of longleaf Florida pine reach up on past that Georgia line.

Stroll through Tallahassee town, or southern Apalachee bound.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Welcome to Local Routes.

I'm Suzanne Smith with WFSU Public Media.

And today I'm in the southern part of Leon County, found in the woods like this in the Longleaf Pines is a fascinating bird.

It's called the Brown Headed Nuthatch.

WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas not only goes in search of this bird, but also in search of their babies.

Brown headed Nuthatch is found throughout the south and endemic to Longleaf pine ecosystem also and shortleaf pine too.

It's one of three bird species that we have that are found only in our southern pinelands, the other two being Bachman Sparrows and Red-Cockaded Woodpecker.

After they fledge many brown headed nuthatches stick around to help the family.

This isn't common in birds.

One of the things when I started working here at Tall Timbers and realize that this cooperative breeder hadn't been very well studied was to think we should have a long term study here.

Tall Timber's start studying the birds when they're in the nest.

Today we're looking for baby birds.

And they're not in here.

Dang Nabit!

We should have done this yesterday.

Perfect place.

That's okay.

We'll go to another nest.

But this is.

This is kind of a typical nest site for them by that, you know, breast height or lower.

And they're looking for these dead stumps.

They're in the last stages of decay.

Softwood is easier to excavate with a beak than living wood.

A dead standing tree is called a snag and Tall Timbers has plenty in the landscape, but Nuthatches will also use artificial nest boxes.

Tall Timbers, Research Station and Land Conservancy is a 2800 acre lab for the study of fire ecology in the lonely, fine ecosystem.

The Brown Headed Nuthatch is a long leaf bird.

The fact that the Brown Headed Nuthatch is a cooperative breeder for young birds sometimes decide not to disperse and attempt to breed.

They hang around with mom and Dad per year and helped mom and dad raise additional young.

That's a pretty unusual behavior among birds.

It's only about 10% of all the birds in the world that exhibit that behavior.

One of those is another long leaf bird, the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker.

There are a lot of questions about why they do that.

And sometimes the only way to get that is this has been done with other cooperatively breeding species is have a very long term study set up looking at how they decide whether to breed or not to breed.

How they disperse .

And so we began just marking birds and following them through.

Jim is studying hundreds of small birds spread throughout the forest.

He has to tell them apart, so he bands them with a unique color combination.

He does this when the bird is still in the nest in late March and early April.

They are big enough to band in just under two weeks.

These are at day ten.

Exactly.

So those quills are starting to emerge.

So I'm would with these guys and put them back and I'm gonna come back in a few days when they are like day 13 and I can wiat until Monday or so.

Two?

Bingo.

So this is these are much more symmetrical and they're also four young here and no unhatched eggs.

He says he weighs and measures each bird.

11.7.

Some thrash around while others lie there.

Might this predict future behavior?

10.5.

A much more active bird than these other ones were.

Rinse and repeat!

Band goes on.

Clamp it down.

Very hard combination here: white over white.

We focus on doing color marking and so we're working more with individual species.

So we do Brown Headed Nuthatches, Red-Cockaded Woodpeckers, Bachman's Sparrows, and also Henslow's sparrows.

They are pretty cute.

They got that big head thing going for them.

You know like makes you think of a kid, a baby, The big head compact shape and the sharp beak make them expert excavators.

The cavities are then used by other birds in the forest.

After they fledged young, other species that use these nests include Eastern Bluebird, Carolina Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse.

We've even had some Downy Woodpeckers and even White Breasted Nuthatches.

Sometimes bluebirds don't wait for the nuthatches to leave.

The last nest we checked, has a nuthatch that is ready to fledge.

We wait and watch and once the birds are out there, Jim and his team keep an eye out for them, during which birds have stuck with the family group and which has moved on and how far away?

One factor in this decision is that males in this population outnumber females by a 5 to 4 ratio, so males are less likely to go out and look for a mate.

So big goal we're hoping to get out with this particular bird is look at so many different decisions that they're making.

What are the outcomes of those different decisions for each individual and how do those affect the overall dynamics of group living?

For WFSU, I'm Rob Diaz de Villegas.

Learn more about the Brown Headed Nuthatch and the Longleaf Forest by going to the WFSU Ecology blog.

Fall might be in the air right now, but if it wasn't for the invention of air conditioning, very few of us could probably handle a Florida summer very well.

Apalachicola is actually the place where air conditioning was first invented.

WFSU's Mike Plummer introduces us to the physician and inventor, John Gorrie.

In Apalachicola sits a small museum to honor a man named Gorrie.

Many Floridians know him as the man who invented refrigeration.

John Gorrie was an early physician and scientist who lived in northwest Florida, primarily Apalachicola, but also in what today we know was Sneeds for a brief time in Jackson County.

He was the father of modern air conditioning and refrigeration.

Well, John Gorrie, within this area or state of Florida, is known as the inventor of the ice machine or the cooling process of ice machines.

That is which is what he was known to do.

He came here from South Carolina in 1833.

He's one of the founding members of the Episcopal Church that was founded in 1836.

He was basically Mr. Apalachicola because not all at once he was the mayor, the town treasurer, the town postmaster general.

He was also president of the Panama City Branch Bank in Apalachicola.

And first and foremost, he was a physician.

When John Gorrie arrived in Apalachicola, he would have found a swampy, antebellum seaport surrounded by vast Florida wilderness.

30 years before the Civil War is when Dr. Gorrie arrives in Apalachicola.

But Florida, at this time has been part of the United States, you know, for only about 12 years.

So it's Florida is a very fresh frontier at the time that he arrives in Apalachicola.

It was an interesting time for him because a lot was going on Apalachicola.

I mean, it was a busy, busy sea port with, you know, exporting millions of pounds of cotton every year.

So it was a working port with sailors coming in and out of all over the world coming here.

And a lot of his original business is not just taking care of the people of the town who are the free, prosperous people.

He's taking care of the enslaved people.

They're hiring him to take care of the enslaved people.

He's taking care of the sailors who arrive on the ships, who are bringing in things like yellow fever or who are sick with malaria.

At the time, they thought that yellow fever was caused by bad vapors.

And I know we all think that that sounds kind of ridiculous in this day and age.

But you have to have it in context for the time.

So Gorrie gets hired by the lumber company here to drain all the swamps in the town, and you've got to keep people healthy.

If you don't have a healthy population, you don't have a workforce.

Every heat wave is bringing in waves of fevers, and the fevers immediately depopulate the town every time there's a heat wave.

Fevers break out.

They don't know at that time they're caused by mosquitoes.

So Dr. Gorrie, at the time, he's close to kind of figuring it out.

He comes up with the thesis that it seems like the changing of the seasons terminates the fevers.

Well, what happens during the changing the seasons?

One, mosquitoes don't breed, and we now know that it's a mosquito vector disease.

But what also happens is that you have less decaying vegetation and it gets cold.

And so those smells go away.

So he's close to figuring it out, but not quite.

And that's what gets him thinking that, okay, it seems like cold is a cure for yellow fever.

So he embarks on his journey to create cold.

And so he began to experiment with ice.

And at that time, ice had to come down from the north.

It came down on ships.

They packed it in sawdust.

It was cut in the Great Lakes are on the lakes up in New York, and an ice syndicate controlled the ice.

And that's kind of funny to think about today.

But there was a syndicate that controlled ice, shipped it down south, impacted and sold us as insulation.

And you had to buy ice from them, and you bought it in blocks of ice.

And so he would buy ice and he started developing ways to hang ice in the rooms of his patients to see if he could cool those rooms down and try to help his patients.

What he set out to do was essentially create coal so he could cure his yellow fever patients because he thought that cold was the cure.

What he ended up with was an actual functioning machine that froze water into ice.

The first time he revealed that he could make ice.

The French emissary there in Apalachicola hosted a banquet and promised ice champagne.

And they everyone wondered how they were going to do it because the ice ship hadn't come.

But Gorrie didn't need an ice ship.

He had created a machine that could make artificial ice.

The patent was granted Patent number 8080 May six, 1851.

Sadly, Dr. Gorrie dies in 1855.

The backers that were going to help him mass manufacture this machine, they had backed out.

So sadly, Dr. Gorrie dies at 53 years old and he never does get to see the tremendous invention that this would essentially be and the benefit to mankind that it would eventually come to be.

So sadly.

He doesn't make any money off of it.

And it's kind of kind of fitting in a way, because I think I don't think and this is conjecture, but I don't think he was interested and making money.

I think that he was really interested in helping his fellow man.

And there you have the basic story of Apalachicola is ice making Doctor John Gorrie.

Now, you might already be familiar with some of that story, but there's a lot more in part to my continues the tale of the original Ice Man.

There's a lot more of a story to Florida's Dear Dr. Gorrie.

Beginning at his beginning.

Even he would would not quite tell the same story about his birth.

So one story is he came over from the Caribbean and it was in Charleston, South Carolina, and he was raised there and he was from Spanish royalty and his mother was the mistress of the king of Spain.

And he came over and he was born in the Caribbean on an island.

And the his mother or the king's mistress and him, we was escorted by a captain of the ship and brought to Charleston.

And the captain's last name was Gorrie.

And that's where he got the name Gorrie.

That's one story, though, and that's that's probably the most official story that we have.

It's my understanding that he was born a Gorrie, and everything that I've seen indicates that I've never seen anything that indicates otherwise.

There is a story there that says otherwise, but I've never seen any evidence that would suggest that.

I've never seen any evidence that suggests an adoption or a naming or anything in legal paperwork that would indicate that he was not born a Gorrie.

And what about the rarely mentioned story about the Ice syndicate and their smear campaign to discredit his ice making invention.

Frederick Tudor started the artificial ice business in 1806 up in Boston Fresh Pond.

He got to cut the ice.

He was a young man.

He cut the ice on the fresh pan and said, you know, an entrepreneur.

And he said, you know, I think we can sell this down south if we do this.

If we if we if we get it on the ship, if we do it right, we can sell this stuff.

So we started cutting it there and they had to build special ships and bust special holding containers.

And every port it went to had to build an ice house or thick with straw or mud or something to hold it.

So he built they had to do all the infrastructure and they did it.

So they were making millions, if not billions of dollars.

By the time Gorrie started perfecting and actually making ice in this country.

Right?

And that scared the bejebbers out of them.

The ice syndicate realized that Gorrie's invention, stood to destroy them, to destroy their industry, to bankrupt them.

And they knew his invention worked.

And so the only way to stop Gorrie was to turn him into a laughingstock.

And so they planted stories in newspapers all over the world that basically labeled him a quack and pooh poohing this, saying it was the guy in the South who thinks he's God almighty, He thinks it tree ice.

Right?

So.

So there was a smear campaign against Gorrie or against whoever is making artificial ice.

And so funding was not going to be had because it was the it was a powerhouse up there saying, no, we're not going to have this.

You're going to be massive in our business.

So when the Civil War came and the blockade was put in place and the ice stopped, there was some problems going on on the South.

I mean, and it wasn't just because they were having a war for the North and the South.

You're messing with the ice now.

That was serious.

And some of the ice.

So by 1862, the two French guys in New Orleans smuggled into actual good working artificial ice machine from France, which Carrier perfected off of Gorrie's design, but he used ammonia instead of saltwater like Gorrie did.

And that was the difference.

If Gorrie would have had more resources here, he would have actually made volumes of ice with his machine.

He had to make some tweaks.

But the principle is exactly the same.

But instead of salt water brine, which Gorrie used, he used ammonia.

WHAM.

He made tons and tons and tons of ice within days, You know, just amazing amount.

And then there's the gory story of the good doctor's feet.

Gorrie died in June of 1855.

He was buried at that time in a cemetery that was on the bay front in Apalachicola.

His remains were later exhumed and moved up to Gorrie Square, where they're buried under a monument to him in Apalachicola, right in front of the Gorrie Museum, a state historic state park.

There's a great story that is told here in Marianna about that.

Whether it's true or not, I don't know.

But you know what great legend would be a legend if we knew it was true.

The legend is at the time that they found or moved Gorrie, they did not find the bones of his feet.

And according to legend in Marianna, the Myrick family was very upset at that.

They moved Gorrie and reburied him in Apalachicola because the Myrick family in Mariana felt that if he was going to be moved, he should be brought here and buried alongside Caroline Gorrie.

And so a year or two later, some bones of of two feet washed up along the Bay shore in Apalachicola.

And someone who knew the Myricks made contact with them and they secured those feet bones, footbones, and brought them to Marianna and they were interred here at St Luke's Cemetery at the foot of Carolyn Gorrie's grave.

So why has the Dr. Gorrie's story been so thin on detail?

Most of Gorey's notes the second larger copy of his machine, his detailed research.

They've all been lost for many, many, many years.

Decades.

No one has known what became of them.

When Gorrie died, his research just disappeared.

But recently, the tale of Apalachicola 's favorite physician has taken a turn.

Historian Dale Cox has tracked some of Dr. Gorey's writings to his New Jersey descendants.

What we have since learned is that, yes, it's Gorrie's research papers, along with some diaries, some journals, some letters.

You know, our goal with this is to make this collection publicly available.

And we want it to be we feel like it's a treasure for the people of Florida and for we want Gorrie to finally receive his due.

And our hope is that this collection is going to reveal who all helped him with this.

So although Dr. John Gorey may be history, his story appears to have new life.

For WFSU Public Media, I'm Mike Plummer.

The land that Tallahassee Community College sits on has a very interesting place in our area's history.

Not only has it been a college campus, but it's also been a military base.

And back in 1929, it was dedicated as the city's first municipal airport called Dale Mabry Field.

But who is Dale Mabry and why did they name that airfield after him?

WFSU's Emma Felton takes a look.

[Music] [Music] [Music] In this week's Spotlight, we feature a local musician who was declared one of the favorites for the 2023 NPR Tiny Desk contest entry.

Here's Sophia.

Camille.

[Music] You said you didn't want to and said you're having a friend in me.

Could you see how that would drive me crazy?

Thought I was all right.

Now there was nothing I didn't try to make you stick inside my mind.

I can't break it, I can't take it.

How do you sleep at night knowing you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do.

but you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do.

I know, you know, I know, you know it But you never, ever, ever show it.

How do you sleep at night knowing you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do.

And more than I should.

But you never could see clearly.

And you always get in too deep and you change your mind.

Delusion is all you feel inside, but your just scared of what went right.

Breaking down my piece of mind.

How doyou sleep at night knowing you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do.

You could search for nights, but you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do.

I know, you know I know, you know it But you never, ever, ever show it.

How do you sleep at night knowing you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I Do you still read my mind the way it seems I keep it still bleeds my time.

Thinking about how you don't deserve all this space in my life but you love the attention.

Maybe that's just why you keep showing up at night.

You know, your call is my kryptonite.

I just can't help but ask why it keeps me up at night knowing that I won't find someone to love as much as I love.

You know how hard I tried that you never mind.

No matter how much I don't want to.

I know, you know.

I know, you know it.

But you'll never, ever, ever show it.

How do you sleep at night knowing you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do.

[music] Who loves you as much as I do.

[Music] and I know, you know I know, you know it But you never, ever, ever show it.

How do you sleep at night knowing you'll never find someone who loves you as much as I.

[Music] You can learn more about Sophia Camille and hear more of her music on our WFSU YouTube channel under our Spotlight playlist and on our WFSU Local Routes website.

That's it for this episode of Local Routes.

You can find these stories and more on our website, WFSU.org/localroutes.

And while you're online, follow us on Facebook and Instagram, plus sign up for our Community Calendar newsletter delivered weekly to your email.

It is a great way to stay on top of events happening in person and in the virtual world.

I'm Suzanne Smith.

For everyone at WFSU Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Have a great week, everyone.

Magnolia Trees greet the southern breezein the Land where the rivers wind.

Seeds which spring up from the past, leave us treasures yet to find.

Where our children play along the land our fathers built with honest hands.

Take a moment now and look around at the paradise we have found.

Take the local routes and journey down the we call our home.

[Music]