The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (3 page)

On the other hand, President Roosevelt, with scholar’s fortitude, kept detailed lists of birds he saw grace the White House lawn. An avid birder, he spied on Baltimore orioles as they flicked their orange-edged tails and on crimson cardinals building sturdy nests. Dutifully he would record their numbers and habits in notebooks. Paradoxically, even though Roosevelt hunted game birds, when songbirds were the issue he agreed with the naturalist John Burroughs, who wrote in
Signs and Seasons
(1886) that the “true ornithologist leaves his gun at home.”
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He understood the clear distinction between game birds (like ducks and ruffled grouse), which were hard to drop, and songbirds (like robins and mockingbirds), which were easy to shoot on the wing but not dinner table fare.

Certain bird species—herons, terns, and ibises, for example—mesmerized Roosevelt. As president, he insisted that killing one of these Florida exotics was a federal crime. And although he wasn’t an expert on brown pelicans, he had carefully studied the freshwater white pelicans of North Dakota and Minnesota, who left their lakes near the Canadian
border and migrated to the Indian River region in Florida like clockwork every autumn. Although T.R. had never been to Pelican Island, a teeming bird rookery, he had read a great deal about the place, thanks to Chapman. Situated in a narrow lagoon located near Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast of Florida, Pelican Island, a five-and-a-half-acre dollop of shells and mangrove hammocks, was abundant with flocks of wading birds, something akin to the Galápagos Islands (in miniature) when Charles Darwin began his evolutionary studies in 1835. If Roosevelt paddled around the island he would have heard the loud murmur of bird chatter, a dozen species all singing in different keys, yet all somehow in unison, giving the Indian River rookery the distinct feel of a God-ordained sanctuary. Exuberant streams of birds actually congregated on Pelican Island like figures in a timeless dream. Great blue herons, for example, lingered for long and often hot hours, statue-still while somehow still managing to groom their breeding plumage, including ornate onyx head feathers that seductively lured a mate. Reading about the calls, stillnesses, and hesitations of these long-legged birds fascinated Roosevelt no end.

The most prominent resident of Pelican Island, however, was its namesake—the brown pelican (
Pelecanus occidentalis.
) Chapman had taken dozens of photographs of brown pelicans congregating there, often carrying silver-colored fish in their elongated beaks as they flew contentedly over the tumbling waters of the Indian River. Studying Chapman’s photographs in his 1900 book
Bird Studies with a Camera
, Roosevelt knew these funny-looking birds were of incalculably greater value alive than dead; if the brown pelican passed into extinction, Florida, he believed, would lose one of its most enchanting charms.

Clearly, Roosevelt understood that wildlife had a sacred order and pelicans were part of this grand design or teleology. For more than 2 million years, by adapting to changed circumstances, prowling for fish by turning downwind, half-folding their wings and then almost belly-flopping into brackish or saline water, they had avoided extinction. With their huge heads submerged, the brown pelicans’ narrow beaks—the attached pouches serving as a dip net—scooped fish amid swarms of mosquitoes and midges in Florida’s glassy lagoons.
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For all their innate awkwardness, these playful birds were actually very efficient hunters. By dive-bombing for mullets from as high as fifty or sixty feet in the air, a healthy brown pelican could consume up to seven pounds of fish per day. Their daily hunting range was a radius of about fifty to sixty miles. And it wasn’t just the frenetic avian activity of pelicans, egrets, ibises, and roseate spoonbills on Pelican Island that Roosevelt embraced as a biological hymnal. He
studied the state’s weather and its terrain, and kept records of its climate. He loved every little thing that grew in wild Florida, studying the beach mice, the green anoles, the gopher tortoises, the ants, the sea turtles, and the osprey, all with biological sympathy.

Ornithologists like Chapman who journeyed to wild Florida in the 1880s learned to love the shimmering wild egrets and elegant spoonbills that populated the rookeries, but only the brown pelicans made them laugh out loud. These were the clowns of the bird world. Their combination of short legs, long necks, and four webbed toes (which enhanced their swimming ability) made them seem clumsy. Because their bodies were so heavy, takeoff was something of a burlesque act. More than a few bird students (like Roosevelt) noted that when a pelican flew solo—which was often—it left an indelible impression. At times the pelicans resembled helium balloons with bricks attached to their feet, frantically flapping to get airborne, seemingly feverish with fatigue, desperate to defy the law of gravity. Nevertheless, they always managed to lift off.

Underlying President Roosevelt’s love of pelicans and other birds was a staunch belief in the healing powers of nature. That he had a mighty strong Thoreaurian “back to nature” aesthetic strain coursing through his veins becomes evident when we read his voluminous correspondence with Chapman, Hornaday, and other leading naturalists of his day, including John Burroughs, William Dutcher, George Bird Grinnell, John Muir, and Fairfield Osborn. Through a combination of book learning and field observations, Roosevelt had a keen sense of the importance of what would come to be known as biological diversity and deep ecology. His appreciation of the beauty of nongame birds like pelicans imbued him with a stout resoluteness to protect these endangered avians. To him the destruction of pelicans—and other nongame birds—was emblematic of industrialization run amok. In fact, with the exception of his family, birds probably touched him more deeply than anything else in his life.

Starting after the Civil War, Americans were faced with the revolutionary impact of Darwinism: everybody, it seemed, weighed in for or against evolutionary theory. To Roosevelt, who read the revolutionary
On the Origin of Species
as a young teenager, Charles Darwin was practically a god, the Isaac Newton of biology. Besides being an excellent scientist, Darwin was a fantastic imaginative writer who had wandered the world far and wide. Because of his intense interest in Darwin, naturalist studies became Roosevelt’s guiding principle. Only the Hebrew scriptures had a more profound impact on human societies than
On the Origin of Species
.
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Although there was a Creator, Roosevelt believed, the natural
world was a series of accidents. Yet he also held a romantic view of the planet, a belief that
Homo sapiens
had a sacred obligation to protect its natural wonders and diverse species. He believed every American needed to get acquainted with mountains, deserts, rivers, and seas. One ethereal experience with nature, he believed, made the world whole and God’s omnipotence indisputable. “Roosevelt,” the historian John Morton Blum concluded, accepted the Darwinian belief in “evolution through struggle as an axiom in all his thinking. Life, for him, was strife.”
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II

After the Civil War, a new “gold rush” throughout America fomented the massacring of wildlife for profit and sport. Game laws were practically nonexistent in much of the interior west and south of the Mason-Dixon line up until the 1890s. Roosevelt was repulsed by firsthand dispatches he received about the abominable eradication of species throughout America. The glorious bison (once somewhere around thirty million to forty million strong) were nearly exterminated from the Great Plains, and jaguars along the Rio Grande simply disappeared into the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Pronghorn antelope could no longer outrun the market hunters and ranchers. The colorful Carolina parakeet
(Conuropsis carolinensis)
and the ubiquitous passenger pigeon
(Ectopistes migratorius)
were about to vanish forever. So was the ivory-billed woodpecker
(Campephilus principalis)
. It was already too late for the great auk
(Pinguinus impennis)
and the Labrador duck
(Camptorhynchus labradorius)
—both species had been permanently eliminated from the planet.
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Using satire to open resistant minds to the conservation crusade, William T. Hornaday’s prophetic
Our Vanishing Wild Life
featured an illustration of a tombstone with “Sacred” carved on top and “Exterminated by Civilized Man 1840–1910” on the bottom. Scrolling downward on the tombstone, Hornaday listed birds made extinct by the epic brutality of humans—the Eskimo curlew, Gosse’s macaw, and purple Guadalupe parakeet among them.
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By the turn of the twentieth century the situation in Florida was particularly acute. Once deemed a vast swamp of little value, the state was experiencing a boom due to the fashion trendiness of its birds—especially their feathers. Ironically, the Florida birds’ splendid display of colorful plumes—nature’s design to draw female birds into a mating ritual—had done its job too well: upper-class women of the “gilded age” were drawn to the male bird’s fanciful plumage and it became the rage to adorn their hats with the beguiling feathers. As a result plume hunters poured into the state, guns in hand, determined to bag wading birds for the exotic
feathers then in high demand. A pound of roseate spoonbill or great white heron wings, for example, was worth more than a pound of gold. For unrepentant old Confederates and lowlifes on the lam, wild Florida’s vast thickets and tangled vegetation offered not only a haven but also a source of easy income. Along the banks of Florida’s coastal rivers, the pallid shine of oil-wick lamps was a common sight. It emanated from plumer camps, where hunters were poised to gun down nongame birds for the New York millinery industry, which paid handsome sums for pallets of feathers.
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Most Florida plume-hunters were uneducated country bumpkins hired as day laborers. A lone plumer working the shallow pools along the Atlantic Ocean could collect 10,000 skins in a single season. A full-sized egret could yield fifty suitable ornamental feathers. Besides skinning the curlews, plovers, and turnstones, the hunters would put the carcasses on ice and ship them to New York by the barrel, where they were considered delicious “bird dishes” in some fine Manhattan restaurants.
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Still, the real dollars came from the fashion industry. White feathers, particularly those of the American egret (known today as the great egret) and the snowy egret, were the most coveted plumage of all. Although the pink feathers of flamingos (stragglers from the Bahamas) and roseate spoonbills were in high demand as trimming, their plumage started to fade away to an anemic pink after a year or two. The egrets’ white feathers epitomized decorative elegance and high status. The demand for beautifully adorned hats fueled an entire industry. By 1900 millinery companies employed around 83,000 Americans, mainly women, to trim bonnets and make sprays of feathers known as aigrettes.
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Although feathers had been used to adorn men and women for centuries, both in the courts of Europe and among indigenous peoples around the world, the garish gilded age took them to a new level of popularity.
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The demand was advanced, in large part, by the proliferation of women’s fashion magazines, where exotic feathers were shown adorning gowns, capes, and parasols. “The desire to be fashionable led scores of thousands of women to milliners for something eye-catching and elegant,” the historian Robin Doughty wrote in
Feathers and Bird Protection
. “If plumes were costly looking, then ladies demanded them by the crateload, and the elegant trimmings pictured regularly in journals meant that bird populations all over the world fell under the gun.”
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Low-gauge shotguns were the weapon of choice. But starting around 1880, the introduction of semiautomatic rifles—although these were only sporadically used—made wholesale slaughter of wading birds much easier.
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By 1886, when George Bird Grinnell founded the Audubon Society,
more than 5 million birds were being massacred yearly to satisfy the booming North American millinery trade. Along Manhattan’s Ladies’ Mile—the principal shopping district, centered on Broadway and Twenty-Third Street—retail stores sold the feathers of snowy egrets, white ibises, and great blue herons. Dense bird colonies were being wiped out in Florida so that women of the “private carriage crowd” could make a fashion statement by shopping for aigrettes. Some women even wanted a stuffed owl head on their bonnets and a full hummingbird wrapped in bejeweled vegetation as a brooch. However, others were aghast at ostentatious displays of feathered hats and jewelry. Led by many of the same women who were agitating for the right to vote, a backlash movement to banish ornamental feathers was under way. The fashion pendulum was slowly swinging away from using birds for exhibitionism. Extravagant birds’ rights tenets and oaths were being advocated by many leading U.S. women suffragists, who took their lead from Queen Victoria, who had issued a public proclamation denouncing ornamental feathers in Great Britain.
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Terrified by the genocide of birds, Frank Chapman, the leading popular ornithologist in America, began delivering a lecture titled “Woman as a Bird Enemy” around New York. He hoped to shame women into abandoning their cruel fashion statements.
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Convinced that an inventory of Florida’s birds was of paramount importance, he also organized the first Christmas bird count; it quickly grew into the largest volunteer wildlife census in the world. Before long more than 2,000 Floridians began participating in bird counts during an annual three-week period around Christmas.
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Early in 1903, the tireless Chapman knew that Theodore Roosevelt, now the president of the United States, remained a “born bird-lover.”
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As governor of New York, T.R. delivered a bold speech on avian rights and cheered on the Lacey Act (landmark legislation passed by Congress on May 25, 1900, to protect birds from illegal interstate commerce). As President William McKinley’s vice president, Roosevelt issued an unequivocal statement endorsing the eighteen state Audubon societies in the United States: “The Audubon Society, which has done far more than any other single agency in creating and fostering an enlightened public sentiment for the preservation of our useful and attractive birds, is [an organization] consisting of men and women who in these matters look further ahead than their fellows, and who have the precious gift of sympathetic imagination, so that they are able to see, and wish to preserve for their children’s children, the beauty and wonder of nature.”
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