The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (132 page)

Today, 100 years after Roosevelt created the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation, many of the small lagoons have still not been mapped. Biologists called the archipelago a wonder of ornithological activity. On French Frigate Shoals alone, in 1909 there were eighteen species of sea-birds including the rare black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross, Bonnien petrel, Bulwer’s petrel, and wedge-tailed shearwater, among other unusual species. On French Frigates Shoals a 120-foot volcanic rock rose over the lagoon, which was alive with growing reefs.
¹⁹
At Gardner Pinnacles—two barren-looking rock outcroppings—new spider species would soon be discovered. The first aerial photograph of Maro Reef showed a pork-chop-shaped atoll in which the coral reefs shot out like spokes from a huge wheel. Discovered by an American whaling ship in 1920, Maro Reef was a “rough quadrangular wreath of white breakers.”
²⁰

A real Robinson Crusoe adventure could be had at Laysan Island, where few if any human footprints could be found. The island was discovered in 1828 by an American captain sailing to the Orient, and the ornithologist Walter K. Fisher had spent a week there during Roosevelt’s presidency, declaring in
National Geographic
that it was one of the most remarkable places on the planet; bold young albatrosses came up to him to be patted.
²¹
The island—three miles in length and two and a half miles in breadth—was a wondrous kingdom for ornithologists because it had a highly saline lake (one of only a few natural lakes in all of Hawaii around which birds congregated).
²²
Just as there is now regular or premium gasoline, guano from Laysan Island was once considered the best fertilizer. The specific mix of bird excrement and coral sand formed a rich calcium phosphate coveted for fuel in California.
²³

What angered Roosevelt in February 1909 was that shiploads of rabbits had been released on Laysan Island by a Honolulu slaughterhouse firm in the hope that these hares would get fat on the thick vegetation—then, when they were at their maximum weight, they would be killed for a shish kebab eaten at Honolulu luaus. The problem was that the rabbits were devastating the tropical ecosystem of the island. Rare plants were being eaten down to nubs.
²⁴
By issuing Executive Order 1019, Roosevelt officially banned such releases of rabbits. Preservationist discipline had arrived in the Hawaiian Territory. Because Laysan Island was so remote, however, policing it to enforce the law against plumers and rabbit raisers
would be difficult. Since the entire Hawaiian Island Federal Bird Reservation was administered by USDA, which didn’t own boats in Hawaii, Roosevelt employed vessels of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service to patrol against poachers and rabbit breeders. The U.S. fish commissioner likewise was ordered to protect the new federal bird reservation, including the ocean whales, from commercial fishing and hunting companies.
²⁵

There was also an archaeological component to the Hawaii Islands Federal Bird Reservation. On the small basalt island of Necker, only forty-six acres in area, numerous religious relics had been discovered. Fifty-five “cultural places” were unearthed there. Many of the discoveries were stone enclosures designated as
wahi pana
(religious shrines) and filled with
makamae
(cultural artifacts). Supposedly, Necker Island had been the last refuge for a Pygmy-like race, the Menchune, who had been chased there by Polynesians. Over the centuries, native Hawaiians made Necker a sacred ceremonial site. In 1988, the George H. W. Bush Administration would list all of Necker Island on the National Register of Historic Places.
²⁶
Every square inch of the island—700 miles northwest of Honolulu—was an antiquities site.

Marine biologists today consider Roosevelt’s Executive Order 1019 a stupendous moment in oceanographic history because it preserved the great bird and seal rookeries of Hawaii from human exploitation. Now called the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the chain continues to serve as nesting areas for more than 14 million breeding seabirds, waterfowl, wintering shorebirds, endangered turtles and seals, and legions of whales. It was Roosevelt’s counterpart of the Galápagos, a gift to marine biology, the world’s largest oceanic conservation area, where evolution was happening incrementally in a discernible way. Here, in the westernmost islands of Hawaii, the food chain remained intact.

Yet if you pick up a Hawaiian guidebook at, say, Barnes & Noble and thumb through the index, you probably won’t find Roosevelt’s name. This omission is based on Roosevelt’s never having visited Hawaii in a fishing craft, yacht, or naval vessel. But you will learn in Hawaiian guidebooks that Twain said that Oahu “beseechingly” haunted him, that Stevenson found the leprosy colony “a land of disfigurement and disease,” and that London had called himself a
kama’aina
(“child of the island”). Only Roosevelt himself, in his
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
(1916), noted the importance of Executive Order 1019 to the marine biology of what he called “the western extension of the Hawaiian archipelagos.”
²⁷

Because Hawaii was a territory in 1909—it did not become a state until 1959—there was no dissent from Capitol Hill over Executive Order
1019. Only the Hawaiian rabbit breeders and eggers were up in arms. The territorial governor, Walter Frear of California, likewise had a few grumbles. None of this amounted to more than a few angry letters for public consumption. In 1911 the Field Museum of Chicago sent Charles A. Corwin to the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation to inventory species. His report on Laysan Island alone was so impressive that it made national news. “It has been established that the island is inhabited by at least 8,000,000 birds, most of which consist of two species of Albatross,” Corwin wrote in the
Christian Science Monitor
, a publication that took ornithology seriously. “There were so many birds on the ground, nesting, that we had to crowd our way through to avoid stepping on them…. We can fully verify the stories that these strange birds have a peculiar dance which resembles the cake walk. They clap their bills together and waddle about with high stepping antics, ducking their heads first under one wing, then under the other. All through the dance they whistle and utter weird sounds.”
²⁸

With the Hawaii Islands Federal Bird Reserve created, the Biological Survey sent Roosevelt an additional twenty-five bird reservations to sign before March 4. While the reporters were abuzz over Taft’s choices for his cabinet and about the inaugural festivities, the Roosevelt administration would stealthily save birds’ breeding grounds. Unnoticed by the
Washington Post
and
New York Times
, the final “I So Declare It” hour had arrived for American ornithologists. Suggestions from Job, Finley, Dutcher, Chapman, Beebe, and other enthusiasts came pouring into the Biological Survey office at the Department of Agriculture. There was a real sense of urgency. On February 25, it virtually rained federal bird reservations in America, and nobody in interregnum Washington had the power to object. For ornithologists of the twenty-first century, these areas are hallowed not only because of their wildlife but also for their green underbrush and marshlands: Salt River (Arizona), Deer Flat and Minidoka (Idaho), Willow Creek (Montana), Carlsbad and Rio Grande (New Mexico), Cold Springs (Oregon), Belle Fourche (South Dakota), Strawberry Valley (Utah), Keechelus, Kachess, Clealum, Bumping Lake and Conconully (Washington), Pathfinder and Shoshone (Wyoming).

What fantastic American names! Stephen Vincent Benét should have written a poem about them. Just reading them aloud is poetry. The two federal bird reservations that the Roosevelt administration likewise created in California were very special, unique in their biodiversity. First, on February 25, came East Park, located in Colusa County an hour north
of Sacramento. Here thousands of swans were struggling to coexist with humans around the cool water of a medium-size lake. A very rare tri-color blackbird also used the watering-hole as a home base for much of the year.
²⁹
In springtime the rolling hills of East Park bloomed with the rare adobe lily (
Fritillaria pluriflora
) and residents of Sacramento came to camp along the lake free of charge. In 1921 the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior took over control of East Lake. Nowadays, even with a hydroelectric dam, the thriving birdlife and flower fields remain federally protected.

But the true gemstone of February was the Farallon Islands, a spectacular cluster of rocky islands in the Pacific Ocean twenty-five miles from Golden Gate Bridge. An inventory of wildlife in the Farallons runs for pages. The islands remain the largest nesting colony south of Alaska and the world’s biggest colony of western gulls. Half of the ashy storm petrels continue to reside on these offshore bird rocks. Marine whales congregate around the Farallons, as do southern sea otters, Dall’s porpoises, minke whales, orcas, and northern elephant seals. Every square foot is full of special designs. Although vegetation is limited, there are clusters of pigweed, tree mallow, false clover, plantain, curly dock, and Monterey cypress. Little skiffs from the San Francisco Bay area often circled around the islands (the largest island is seventy acres in area) to see the colorful tufted puffin or watch two-ton elephant seals at Saddle Rock dispute during the breeding season over harems. A biological site of the rarest kind, the Farallons were influenced by the California current, westward winds, upwelling mixing, deep cold water, and finally, in February 1909, by the Roosevelt administration’s “citizen bird” policy.
³⁰

From Hawaii to Florida and Michigan to Alaska, birding areas and habitats were put off-limits and set aside for the future. Their status would be enforced by the Biological Survey, National Audubon Society, and AOU. In Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Louisiana, and Florida the plumers were isolated and suppressed, forced to operate clandestinely, like criminals. And when Roosevelt wrote that birds should be saved for reasons “unconnected with dollars and cents,” he wasn’t speaking just for himself.
³¹
Groups like the National Audubon Society and AOU had swept across the land. The unstated presumption was that weird beaks, webbed claws, and wingspreads had aesthetic value for a generation of Americans who championed “citizen bird” and were fed up with market butchers. When Senator George C. Perkins, (among other things) a forestry advocate, questioned T.R. over wildlife protection policy the presi
dent snapped. “I would like to break the neck of the feebly malicious angleworm who occupies the other seat as California’s Senator,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Ted; “he is a milk-faced grub named Perkins.”
³²

With the exception of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and a few others, industrialists of the time were perplexed by Roosevelt’s passion for protecting loons, cormorants, and herons. What would lead a hero of the Spanish-American War to insist that shooting a dark-eyed junco was akin to grand larceny? Didn’t Roosevelt’s infatuation for birds constitute fanaticism? Roosevelt, for example, had shut down prime Florida real estate to make life comfortable for egrets. “I have no command of the English language that enables me to express my feelings regarding Mr. Roosevelt,” the railroad tycoon Henry Flagler said. “He is shit.”
³³

Flagler was correct in considering Roosevelt a vicious adversary. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted, T.R., despite his disarming toothy smile, “feared nobody” and was a “dangerous antagonist.” And there was a cost to interfering with Roosevelt’s love of pelicans and petrels: T.R. would blast his anticonservationist critics as hopeless “spoilers,” “fools,” “demagogues,” “exploiters,” and “idiots.” The novelist Booth Tarkington, long after Roosevelt died, reflected on how T.R. had subjected people he perceived as anticonservationist to verbal tirades. “The Colonel had his own way of saying ‘swine,’ and it gave that simple Gothic word a peculiarly damning power,” Tarkington wrote. “The swine he had in mind seemed to be incomparably more swinish than the ordinary swine that other people sometimes mention.”
³⁴

Likewise John Burroughs explained in his
Journals
how Roosevelt could be a cutthroat political adversary when it came to the defense of songbirds. “He was a live wire, if there ever was one, in human form,” Burroughs wrote in his journal. “His sense of right and duty was as inflexible as adamant. His reproof and refusal came quick and sharp. His manner was authoritative and stern. He was as bold as a lion and, at times, as playful as a lamb.”
³⁵
Every word Roosevelt uttered on behalf of wildlife protection seemed to have an exclamation point. When it came to squaring-off with politicians he was a specialist at haranguing, never crying uncle, giving his opponents the back of his hand. When challenged about the legality of his national monuments, federal bird reservations, or national forests, he took on that lean, ravenous look of a famished wolf. America had a new conservationist code to promote, thanks to Roosevelt: pummel the exploiters until they were licked.
³⁶
He believed that his successor, William Howard Taft, would take just such a line.

Taft had even promised to keep Pinchot as the head of the Forest Service—a real concession following the dismissal of Garfield. Roosevelt had created his own circle or set of outdoorsmen in government, including Pinchot and Garfield, who agreed with his every sales pitch, plea from the bully pulpit, executive order, sermon about outdoorsmen, and writ concerning wildlife. And the first eight weeks of 1909 were their golden time. These acolytes weren’t Luddites ready to sabotage the cutting blades in defense of nature. Many were evolutionists—such as David Starr Jordan and Henry Fairfield Osborn—who understood the arcane biology of how conjunction took place in colonial protozoa and cared deeply about species recognition marks. Roosevelt had nevertheless kicked down the door of the wildlife protection movement, knocking it off its hinges, by giving evolutionists places of honor at his table in the White House. As an ex-president, Roosevelt would travel to Florida and Louisiana to inspect his revolutionary rookeries, pleased at his accomplishments on behalf of “citizen bird.” “The number and tameness of the big birds showed what protection has done for the bird life of Florida of recent years,” he wrote after inspecting his federal bird reservations in the Gulf of Mexico. “The plumed lesser blue herons, and more rarely the great blue heron and the lovely plumed white egret, perched in the trees or flapped across ahead of the boat.”
³⁷