The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [11]
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.31 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.32
Early in 1903, the tireless Chapman knew that Theodore Roosevelt, now the president of the United States, remained a “born bird-lover.”33 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.”34
Once Roosevelt became president, under his initiative, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had already publicly supported the various Audubon societies, and in its Yearbook 1902 it pleaded with farmers and hunters to leave nongame birds alone.35 With the future of Pelican Island in the balance, the bird population about to be wiped out, Chapman understood that the time to seek President Roosevelt’s support on banning the bird slaughter there was now. If the dollop of land was not declared a USDA reservation, it would soon be a dead zone like the ground-down New Jersey Flats.
III
In early March 1903 President Roosevelt was mired at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. trying to push forward an anti-anarchy bill and was meeting with newly elected U.S. senators (from Idaho, Kentucky, Washington, and Utah) at the White House. Nevertheless, he still made time for his ornithologist friends. William Dutcher updated T.R. on the status of lighthouse keepers employed by the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) in Key West and the Dry Tortugas (seven islands located seventy miles off the mainland in the Straits of Florida) to protect nesting roosts. The bird-lovers also swapped stories about the health and well-being of their various friends in the Florida Audubon Society, an organization of which Roosevelt happened to be an honorary founder.36 (Dutcher himself would soon become the first president of the new National Association of Audubon Societies.*)
The gregarious president liked showing off his extensive knowledge about the state’s ecosystem, which included varied habitats like sea grass beds, salt marshes, and tree hammocks. Roosevelt’s library had a half-shelf of books about Florida’s wildlife. During the Spanish-American War he had been stationed at Tampa Bay waiting to be dispatched to Cuba. His Uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, his father’s brother, a famous mid-nineteenth-century naturalist, had written a landmark ornithological book in 1884, Florida and the Game Water-Birds of the Atlantic Coast and the Lakes of the United States. (It was Uncle Rob who taught Theodore about the importance of what is now called ecology.) At the time T.R. was forty-four years old. He was stocky, with piercing blue eyes. His rimless spectacles and robust mustache dominated a remarkably unlined face. He spoke in clipped sentences, often making hand gestures and grimaces to underscore a point. This was followed by a hearty chuckle