The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (123 page)

Darling eventually graduated and was hired as a political cartoonist at the
Sioux City Journal
. He deeply admired Roosevelt’s Dakota trilogy on hunting, and he rallied to the president’s side in 1900 owing to their shared affinity for preservationism-conservationism. To some people, Darling’s allegiance to Roosevelt was nearly insufferable. His inaugural political cartoon in the
Journal
, in fact, showed McKinley and T.R. on an elephant, lording it over a broken-down donkey carrying an imbecilic-looking William Jennings Bryan.
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But Darling’s satire was popular, and he was soon snagged by the
Des Moines Register and Leader
and given cre
ative license. With doglike devotion to all things Rooseveltian, Darling used his carte blanche to promote all aspects of the conservation movement in his cartoon strips.
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When Darling spoofed the developers of his day, he always knew that Roosevelt was cheering him on. In particular, Darling took a deep, personal interest in Roosevelt’s attempts to stop the wanton destruction of bird habitats around America, appreciating that the president seldom hesitated to exercise executive power on behalf of wildlife. To Darling the federal bird reservations were a masterstroke against ignorance and greed. Few Americans even noticed their establishment, but Pine Island, Dry Tortugas, Stump Lake, and Three Arch Rocks became magical places to Darling. A great friendship developed between T.R. and Darling, with conservation as the link.
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Darling relished the fact that it took Congress many decades to fully understand the permanency of Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” executive orders: and by then it was too late to reverse. Darling also claimed the avian photographs of William L. Finley—particularly his iconic Californian shot images of golden eagles, condors, and great blue heron—as galvanizing influences on his wildlife protection crusade.
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Darling believed that the federal bird reservations, even more than the national parks or national forests, were the enlightened, sensible way to save aviaries. Claiming that President Roosevelt was his mentor, Darling, a Republican, became an important warrior in Florida’s land issues. By 1917 Darling’s pro-conservation cartoons were syndicated in some 150 dailies by the
New York Herald Tribune
. When T.R. died two years later, Darling was shattered—losing Roosevelt was like losing a father. But he didn’t mope for too long. He quickly moved to fill the void left by the great man—especially in Florida. Preservationist leadership always meant a lifetime of knife fights with rich companies and their soulless lawyers.

Wisely, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited Darling in 1934 to serve on the President’s Committee for Wildlife along with Aldo Leopold and Thomas Beck. A year later he hired Darling to lead the Bureau of Biological Survey into a productive period after Merriam’s era. In this capacity, Darling struck on an interesting conservation awareness scheme. He designed (and Franklin Roosevelt approved) a “duck stamp” that generated extra income for the U.S. wildlife refuges.
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Growing ever more fervent about protecting T.R.’s achievements in wild Florida, Darling founded the National Wildlife Federation, largely keeping the “wildlife
protection legacy” of T.R. alive for decades to come. Just as Theodore Roosevelt saved bison and elks on preserves, Darling led efforts to rescue Nevada’s dwindling antelope herds. And during World War II, while other cartoonists focused on the war, Darling worked around the clock to save various islands near Fort Myers from overzealous developers.
⁹⁵

Owing to Ding Darling’s intense lobbying, in December 1945 President Harry Truman approved a lease with the State of Florida creating the Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge, adjacent to the sites T.R. had saved in 1908. Besides birds, Darling had sought protection from the Truman administration for all estuarine habitats including sea grass beds and mud-flats.
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Keeping field notes and making sketches, as Theodore Roosevelt would have wanted, Darling recorded dark shadowy terns whose colors were indiscernible, black skimmers clouding the sky like dimly seen bats, and reddish egrets wading in flats looking for small fish. There were no flamingos to record, however, for these magnificent Phoenicopteridans had been killed off in Florida by plumers, who later bragged about it at night in taprooms. Darling’s cartoons also highlighted his efforts to create a refuge for the “toy” deer of the Keys from marauding hunters. His efforts helped to create the National Key Deer Refuge in 1957. His life was testimony against the destructive lunacy of Floridians.

When Darling died in 1962, at eighty-six, his foundation proposed renaming Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge after him. In 1967, with the approval of President Lyndon Johnson, the J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge was officially created as part of a larger, more easily administered complex that encompassed three of Roosevelt’s refuges of 1908—Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, and Island Bay. Even though this new refuge wasn’t declared until more than sixty years after T.R.’s death, its existence can be seen as his crowning achievement for wildlife protection in Florida. Nowadays it is populated by great egrets, snowy egrets, wood storks, roseate spoonbills, great and little blue herons, white and brown pelicans, tri-color herons, yellow-crowned night herons, short- and long-billed dowitchers, lesser and greater yellowlegs, anhingas, cormorants, blue-winged teal, ospreys, and bald eagles. Today, also, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge is one of the top ten birding spots in America.
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“Ding idolized Roosevelt,” Darling’s grandson, Christopher Koss, recalled. “They both shared an interest in ecology and refused to waver when it came to protecting birds. Roosevelt inspired not just Darling but an entire generation to fight for conservation. With Roosevelt as leader there became a meeting of the young minds.”
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Theodore Roosevelt’s “wild Florida” strategy of 1908 might have
failed if it hadn’t been for the support of people like McLeod, Bradley, Dutcher, Chapman, and Darling. Recognizing that for victory in Florida, pro-wild life troops were necessary, Roosevelt had recruited them. When he approved the appointment of wardens in the tradition of Kroegel and Bradley, he felt the same unswerving conviction he once exhibited as a Rough Rider in Cuba. Prototypes of future on-site employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, these biologically informed wardens enlisted eagerly in Roosevelt’s cause. Roosevelt encouraged his disciples on how to win through a combination of public education, grassroots work, alliance-building, and scathing ridicule. The key factor was bringing poachers and plumers to account. Some of these Rooseveltians later became Bull Moosers, paying T.R. homage well into the 1940s, when World War II caused the progressive movement to taper off.

What’s most impressive about Roosevelt’s bird reservations is how coordinated the system became. Signing executive orders on behalf of birds became a habit for Roosevelt during his last eighteen months in office. The Biological Survey’s sanctuaries were like latticework, linked by regional offices. What Roosevelt asked Floridians to do between 1901 and 1909 was think about the future. The industrial growth of Jacksonville, Tampa, and Miami was a good thing. The Reclamation Service might consider draining the Everglades and building canals throughout south Florida. People had to live and improve. Yet, Floridians also needed to develop “the right kind of a civilization.”
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Typically, Roosevelt envisioned Florida’s big cities surrounded by big greenbelts. He knew that Florida was a fragile, hurricane-lashed eco-system and that it needed perennial care. Florida couldn’t be stripped of its greenness. Manatees, roseate spoonbills, greens and leatherbacks, marlins, sooties, and mangrove forests—all were a heritage to be passed down to future generations. Did Floridians not want their children to see colonies of interesting waterbirds? And coral-beds? Outsiders would always try to swoop into Florida and extract natural resources for profit, leaving behind environmental degradation. Shouldn’t real Floridians protect their state’s biological bounty of tropical forests, pristine beaches, and coral reefs from corporate molestation?

VIII

The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry once wrote, “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.”
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Berry might almost have been communicating with William L. Finley’s spirit. For Finley, as Oregon’s pioneering wildlife photographer, waded in scum ponds and slept soaking wet in ocean-rock crevices in order to document the habits of migratory birds. His stolid ornithological concentration had already become legendary in rural Oregon. The establishment of Three Arch Rocks on October 14, 1907, inspired Finley to preserve yet another waterfowl concentration site in Oregon: the Klamath basin, a series of lakes and marshes that were a stopover for approximately three-quarters of the Pacific Flyway waterfowl.
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These extensive wetlands attracted more than 6 million waterfowl, including the American white pelican, the double-crested cormorant, and numerous heron species (including the kind that brought Wendell Berry such comfort).
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Roosevelt didn’t write an introduction to Finley’s first book,
American Birds
, as he had done for Herbert Job’s
Wild Wings
, but he nevertheless marveled at Finley’s ornithological accuracy.
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The two simultaneous events—Three Arch Rocks becoming a federal reserve and
American Birds
being published—were not accidental.

Nobody did more to save the birds of Oregon and Washington than William L. Finley, pictured here patting a cormorant. Finley, a brilliant wildlife photographer, led the West Coast Audubon Society movement
.
William L. Finley. (
Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
)

In 1905 Finley and Bohlman—fresh from studying golden eagles in California—started spending a lot of time in the lower Klamath basin, on instructions from William Dutcher, now head of the National Association of Audubon Societies. Nowhere in North America were there so many jungles of floating tules (pronounced
too-lees
) as in the Klamath basin. Tules are a huge species of sedge, part of the family Cyperaceae. Little
clusters of sprouting tules—a plump, rounded green stem with grass-like leaves often clustered around beige flowers—were once so common around Tulelane Lake that in the California-Oregon wetlands there was a popular expression, “out in the tules,” meaning “beyond way-away.” Along the shorelines of the California-Oregon lakes the tule marshes served as a buffer against water surges and high winds. Even the haze that beset the state borderline area, particularly along the Pacific coast, was known as tule fog. Walking on a tule was akin to hiking in snowdrifts—you never knew when you’d plunge downward. Treading carefully in the tules, Finley and Bohlman once again delivered photographic gems. Their straight-on black-and-white portrait of a canvasback in tule was as artful as an Audubon print. Some of the photographs, such as four Caspian terns screaming at each other, were comical. Others, like some tiny spotted sandpipers dancing around a spring flower, were aimed at winning children over to the Audubon Society’s cause.
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Worried that President Roosevelt—his chief ally—was consumed by the ceaseless distractions of Washington, D.C., Finley focused his activism on counterbalancing the San Francisco plume hunters who were killing off birdlife in the Klamath basin. Keeping detailed notes about the plumers he encountered, Finley recorded that the going rates per dozen birds were: teal ($3), mallard ($5), pintail ($7), and canvasback ($9). Bales of skins were being shipped out, like hay. Camping on marsh tules, which made a fine mattress, Finley started writing up his field notes as articles for
The Condor
magazine in 1907; these articles included “Among the Pelicans,” “The Grebes of Southern Oregon” and “Among the Gulls on Klamath Lake.”
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As Roosevelt had intuited, Finley was a naturalist writer almost as good as Muir and Burroughs. And what made Finley sui generis among wildlife photographers of the early twentieth century was that he also took motion pictures of the lower Klamath. He had footage of great migratory waterfowl swarms and close-ups of pelicans nesting. (Roosevelt liked that, too: after all, he had filmed Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy wolf-coursing in Oklahoma.) Today, Finley’s grainy black-and-white films are prized possessions in the archives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Much like Paul Kroegel at Pelican Island, Finley at the lower Klamath and Lake Tule was a master of walking softly among the birds. The western grebe rookeries he studied were like none other in the world. He would sit quietly for hours in the low reeds, camouflaged, spying as grebes dived and swam underwater with chicks on their backs. Even when the wind ruffled the surface of the tule and sheets of rain blew east
ward horizontally, Finley didn’t abandon his blind. Once he got lucky and photographed western grebes hatching from eggs amid dry tules. “We watched as one of the little Western Grebes cut his way out of the shell and liberated himself,” Finley wrote in
The Condor
. “The wall of his prison is quite thick for a chick to penetrate, but after he gets his bill through in one place, he goes at the task like clock work and it only takes him about half an hour after he has smelled the fresh air to liberate himself. After the first hole, he turns himself a little and begins hammering in a new place and he keeps this up till he has made a complete revolution in his shell, and the end or cap of the egg, cut clear around, drops off, and the youngster soon kicks himself into the sunshine.”
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