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There are so many birds on the runway in Palmyra that planes can only takeoff mid day when there is very little activity. The largest purchase to date for the Nature Conservancy is the Palmyra an atoll situated about 300 miles north of the equator. Palmyra has five times as many coral species as the Florida Keys and three times as many as Hawaii. It is home to the world's largest invertebrate, the rare coconut crab, and a population of red-footed booby birds second only to that of the Galapagos. It is the last marine wilderness area left in the U.S. tropics and is home to the last remaining stands of Pisonia grandis beach forest in the world. Palmyra was a US Navy supply base in World War II, the site of a proposed nuclear waste dump, an unsuccessful coconut plantation and of various development schemes. Palmyra is most famous for the 1974 slaying of a married couple which became the subject of the best-selling book "And the Sea Will Tell," by Vincent Bugliosi.
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