The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (119 page)

After careful consideration the Biological Survey recommended that Flattery Rocks quickly be declared a federal bird reservation; Roosevelt
agreed. On October 23, 1907, he signed an Executive Order to that effect. And the Roosevelt administration took its environmental responsibility even farther. On the same day, Roosevelt declared Quillayute Needles (consisting of Hand Rock, Carroll Islets, Bald Island, Jagged Islet, Cake Rock, James Island, Hunting Rock, Quillayute Needles, Rounded Islet, Alexander Island, Perkins Reef, North Rock, Middle Rock, Abbey Island, and South Rock) a federal bird reservation. Then he did the same on behalf of Copalis Rock, unsurveyed rock islands with seabirds, hauling seals, and sea otters. The pelt hunters, fishing organizations, plumers, pot hunters, weekend poachers, oil drillers, and corporate despoilers had been shut down by the federal government along the coast from Seattle to Portland at environmentally sensitive locales. More than any other president, Roosevelt used executive orders without consulting Congress. There was no reason for Washington state to be immune from them. “Roosevelt had the sense to keep wild places in Washington wild,” Kevin Ryan of the state’s Maritime National Wildlife Refuge Complex has noted. “The shear rocks are too hard for people to climb, so all three Roosevelt reserves have become species indicator zones.”
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Roosevelt had grabbed land for the Biological Survey and saved the most enchanting part of Washington state coast for future generations. He said that his own great-grandchildren would someday get to smell Washington’s salty breeze, see the surf-carved ocean rocks, feel the riptide at the roiled straits, and marvel at God’s creation without the stink of gasoline. In Washington state they would be able to see mountains at the ocean’s edge with primeval coniferous forests untouched by axes. They would hear the long-drawn call of loons or watch kittiwakes build nests. By boat, they could encounter pristine islands along the international boundary with Canada. They would be able to imagine what Flattery Rocks, Quillayute Needles, and Copalis Rock had been like during the long-gone days when Captain James Cook stumbled on them and Indians built stockade villages at the foot of the towering ocean rocks and searched for lobsters, oysters, crabs, and fish. Over half of America’s Pacific coast bird species used these Washington state offshore island rocks, and so the Roosevelt administration shut them off from human encroachment.

Today all three of these national wildlife refuges—Copalis, Flattery Rocks, and Quillayute Needles—work together as the Washington Maritime NWR Complex. Under Roosevelt’s executive orders, these islands remain closed to the public—they belong to the seabirds and seals. As Roy Crandall, director of publicity for the Pan American Exposition,
wrote in a 1909 edition of
Technical World Magazine
, President Roosevelt (and the Audubon societies)
*
single-handedly saved “the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California in the Pacific.” Owing to Roosevelt’s foresight “thousands of protected birds now swarm and multiply in safety and in confidence for they are becoming so tame that bird wardens walk among them and brush them from their paths.”
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III

Once Finley had persuaded the Roosevelt administration to save bird rookeries in Oregon and Washington, he turned his lobbying efforts to wetlands known for their waterfowl: the marshes of Klamath, Tule, and Malheur (which means “misfortune” in French; the name was given after Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson Bay Company was robbed of his furs there in 1826).
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Finley and Bohlman camped for over a month in the marshes of Lower Klamath Lake on the border of Oregon and California during the summer of 1905 and photographed the abundant waterfowl for the National Association of Audubon Societies. Their photographs, as well as their report detailing the tremendous numbers of birds being slaughtered ($30,000 worth of grebes by feather hunters in 1903 and over 120 tons of waterfowl by market hunters in 1904), led to the Klamath becoming the first major waterfowl refuge established and the first refuge associated with the reclamation project.
³⁰

Writing years later in
Nature Magazine
about the federal bird reservation movement in the Pacific Northwest during the Roosevelt era, Finley offered a succinct rationale for west coast bird refuges in wetlands (not just on oceanic rocks). “A very large number of lakes and ponds have been drained and many swamps have been dried up under the guise of making agricultural land,” Finley wrote. “With the gradual spread of population, each year the migratory flocks return to former nesting sites, only to find them destroyed, and their natural food supply diminished. The vital point today in wild fowl preservation is that a goodly number of the remaining lakes, ponds, and swamps must be preserved. No matter how many game laws we have or how rigidly these are enforced birds, like people, cannot live without homes and many species are sure to be pushed to the point of final disappearance.”
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Because Washington and Oregon weren’t overly populated (after all, they got about 140 inches of rain annually) and the extraction operations were just beginning along the Pacific Northwest coast, Roosevelt had been able to make a preemptive strike on behalf of wildlife in 1907 with Three Arch Rocks, followed by the three Washington state bird rock archipelagos and the waterfowl marshes of Oregon. On the same numerologist’s dream of a day (08/08/08) that Klamath Lake was established, so too was Key West. Florida, in 1908, proved far more difficult. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was ready to methodically finish the job he had started at Pelican Island, Passage Key, and Indian Key. Outfoxing his opponents every step of the way, confusing them with his embrace of both hunting and preservationist polarities, Roosevelt issued one executive order after another from February to October 1908 to save sites in Florida such as Mosquito Inlet, Dry Tortugas, Key West, Pine Island, Palma Sola, Matlacha Pass, and Island Bay.
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Just as Upton Sinclair’s book
The Jungle
spurred Roosevelt to issue laws regulating meatpacking,
Wild Wings
saved birdlife in Florida. Understanding that in the tropics residents sometimes resorted to slash-and-burn practices, the president moved quickly to protect “Florida’s wildlife heritage.” No salt prairie, coral reef, mangrove thicket, or bird rock was precluded from the Biological Survey’s consideration. And Roosevelt had the congressional ruling of June 28, 1906, about not disturbing or trespassing on federal bird Reservations, to work with as a legal deterrent in Florida. Not that it was foolproof—the congressional order was frequently defied. A deranged Floridian, for example, shot four of Roosevelt’s pelicans on Mosquito Inlet, claiming that the refuges were illegal. The courts ruled in favor of the Roosevelt administration.
³³
The assailant pleaded guilty and paid a steep fine.

This was a time of profound, positive change in the Florida wildlife protection movement. Numerous islands along Florida’s Gulf of Mexico and every bird rookery along the Atlantic Ocean now had aesthetic value to Roosevelt. He would have to save them from the persistent ignorance of the ex-Confederate yokels and from railroad executives like Henry Flagler. In
An Autobiography
, Roosevelt listed his most notable wildlife protection achievements in Chapter II, “The Natural Resources of the Nation.” Among them, Florida ranked high. In particular, he saved the West Indian manatees (
Trichechus manatus latirostris
) at Mosquito Inlet in Volusia County, about eighty miles from Orlando. Roosevelt hoped to create “safe havens” throughout Florida where these manatees could live unmolested, as President Ulysses S. Grant had done for the northern
fur seals of Alaska. The manatee—whose name is Haitian, meaning “big beaver”—was almost as special to Roosevelt as the buffalo.
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Although he did not create an American Manatee Association, he did fight for the species’ survival. “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” he said with regard to protecting Florida’s manatees and seabirds, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”
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Exactly when President Roosevelt brought manatees into his wild-life protection program remains unclear. (Burroughs, we are told by the ornithologist Charles William Beebe, astonishingly didn’t know what a manatee was before visiting Florida in 1903.
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) Perhaps as a boy Roosevelt encountered manatees or sea cows; they are part of the mermaid myth and had become popular characters in children’s books. Maybe he read one of the landmark manatee studies by Outram Bangs or Alfred Henry Garrod.
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Known for barrel-rolling and playful chases, manatees were hard to dislike. They continually grabbed and kissed each other, and lolled for hours in the warm waters of Florida, evidently with no worries or woes. They were herbivores and socialized with one another by nuzzling playfully. Children’s books of the mid-nineteenth century often portrayed the manatee fondly, much as they portrayed the friendly panda. (Fishermen, by contrast, often denounced manatees as homely and shot them on sight.) During the Great Depression they were poached for meat.

Perhaps Robert B. Roosevelt’s
Florida and the Game Water-Birds
had affected Roosevelt. In that book, Uncle Rob had briefly diverged from his loosely structured autobiographical narrative to talk about the manatee herds he encountered throughout Florida. He noted how tourists near Mosquito Inlet couldn’t believe that “cows feed under water,” until they saw a stubby-snouted manatee munching on and sheltering under freshwater plants. “The animals and birds are as queer and unnatural as the herbage,” R.B.R. wrote of aquatic Florida. “Or as a climate which furnishes strawberries, green peas, shad, and roses at Christmas.”
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A close relative of the manatee—Stellar’s sea cow—had been hunted into extinction in 1768, and Roosevelt worried that the same fate awaited the West Indian species. Indeed, in 1885, an observer in Florida noted that “ten years ago the meat (of a manatee) could be bought at fifty cents a pound. The animals are becoming far too scarce to admit of it being sold at all. There is no doubt that the manatee is fast becoming an extinct animal.” And another factor in the manatees’ uncertain prospect was that they reproduced slowly. Male manatees didn’t breed until they were nine years old, and females didn’t reach sexual maturity until they were five.
A lone calf was then born every three to six years. Mothers insisted on nursing their babies for up to two years.

Given these facts, Roosevelt was concerned about whether manatees had a future in Florida. Even though his Mosquito Inlet Reservation was ostensibly to protect native birds on small mangrove and salt grass islets, shoals, sandbars, and sand spits in Mosquito Inlet and the mouths of the Halifax and Hillsboro Rivers, manatees, he knew, also would receive needed protection in the warden-patrolled waters, especially during calving season. Part of his reason for setting aside Mosquito Inlet (near Daytona Beach), as a federal bird reservation—by means of an executive order issued on February 24, 1908—was to protect the manatees’ northernmost range. The purpose of saving Mosquito Inlet, a primordial Darwinian laboratory, was to keep the manatees there free from human molestation; they were the most essential large mammal in the Florida ecosystem. This was the same rationale he used for declaring Three Arch Rocks a federal bird reservation—doing so had the additional benefit of saving seals. If Floridians couldn’t rally to protect manatees, then the probable fate of such lesser creatures as Suwannee bass, striped mud turtle, red-cockaded woodpecker, and southeastern beach mice was dismal indeed. Also, selfishly, Roosevelt wanted manatees saved so that he could enjoy them when he went spearfishing after his tenure at the White House was over.
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Sea turtles played a significant role in another of Roosevelt’s federal bird reservations. The president liked the fact that sea turtles came from “a different world.” Long before the biologist Marston Bates published
The Forest and the Sea
in 1960, Roosevelt understood that the “sea margin”—where marine and terrestrial environments mixed—meant
everywhere
in Florida. Whether it was on tidal flats, sandy beaches, or flyspeck islets, marine species often used land and sea interchangeably.
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Certainly this was true of sea turtles. The Atlantic coast of Florida, especially from Melbourne Beach to Palm Beach was the world’s most crucial habitat for sea turtles—loggerheads, greens, and leatherbacks.
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Keeping up on sea turtle biology Roosevelt wanted to protect egg clutches from predators ranging in menace from raccoons to Miami restaurateurs. Roosevelt didn’t mind if fishermen caught these turtles to eat (he personally thought turtle fritters were
dee-licious
) but ravaging their breeding grounds indiscriminately needed correction.

On April 6, 1908, Roosevelt declared the Tortugas Keys (now Dry Tortugas National Park) a federal bird reservation. (The Tortugas group, located ninety miles west of Key West, Florida, and 470 miles southeast of
New Orleans, consisted of eight little islands: Loggerhead Key, Bird Key, Garden Key, Long Key, Bush Key, Sand Key, Middle Key, and East Key.) Roosevelt boldly protected both sea turtles’ egg-laying and the boobies that congregated by the thousands in the buttonwood trees. When the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon first visited these coral reefs in 1513, he marveled at the colonies of sea turtles he encountered. His crew recorded catching 160 of them. Ponce de Leon considered them a good omen, and they were also perfect for soup and stew; he was the one who named the remote island group Tortugas (“turtles”). John James Audubon had spent days in Tortugas Key mainly to observe the sooty terns that annually nested here, raised chicks, and then migrated back to the Yucatán peninsula.
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In Caribbean pirate lore, the chain had a bad reputation as a site of shipwrecks; Caribbean captains, in fact, called the reefs an “underwater graveyard.”
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Before long, the word “Dry” was added to nautical charts to warn mariners that there was no fresh water on the island chain.