Deadly Refuge

Wildlife photographer Hannah Swensen grew up, literally, on the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. He father was the manager and their house was right in the middle of over 9,000 pristine acres where hundreds of species of birds competed for air space with jumbo jets headed to and from New York´s JFK Airport, which was right on the other side of the bay. After a bungled marriage, Hannah winds up back home on Long Island with her mother Olive, a seventy-five-year-old Edith Bunker-type who...
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Wildlife photographer Hannah Swensen grew up, literally, on the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. He father was the manager and their house was right in the middle of over 9,000 pristine acres where hundreds of species of birds competed for air space with jumbo jets headed to and from New York´s JFK Airport, which was right on the other side of the bay. After a bungled marriage, Hannah winds up back home on Long Island with her mother Olive, a seventy-five-year-old Edith Bunker-type who drives Hannah crazy with kindness.

Back at her beloved Jamaica Bay, with the early-morning sun just edging over the horizon, Hannah photographs a snowy egret in a rare courtship ritual flight. Though giddy with excitement of a once-in-a-lifetime photo shoot, she is distressed to see some disturbing changes in the Refuge--barbed-wire fences, aluminum storage huts, deep truck tire ruts in delicate areas. On her way out of the Refuge, she gets rammed by a truck, assaulted, and robbed of her camera.

After getting nowhere with the police (they can´t be bothered investigating a measly hit-and-run robbery), she enlists the help of Customs Agent Jack Lager, who is investigating a smugling operation at JFK Airpoort.

Through a series of sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious events, they wind up battling South African terrorists, renegade Marine turncoats, and neo-Nazi skinheads in a struggle to stop the invasion of South Africa by a gang of racist killers and save the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. They get beat up, shot at, and have a missile fired at them, while getting help from, among others, a trio of flightless Canada geese, a group of Hasidic rabbis and, of course, the ever-present Olive.