The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [15]
Michael McCurdy, well-known illustrator of John Muir reprint books, pays homage to President Roosevelt’s saving of Florida’s brown and white pelican rookeries.
Illustration of T.R. petting a brown pelican. (Courtesy of Michael McCurdy)
What Roosevelt doesn’t mention in An Autobiography was the backlash against his creation of bird refuges. The plumers and the millinery industry fought back, appealing to public opinion, lobbying Congress, and, in the most extreme cases, shooting at bird wardens. A battle royal ensued between powerful exploiters of nature versus beleaguered preservationists. Determined to win the so-called Feather Wars against plumers and market hunters—not to give an inch and to use the full force of the U.S. federal government as his arsenal—Roosevelt declared Passage Key, another brown pelican nesting area in Florida, the third federal refuge in October 1905.* This sixty-three-acre island was located offshore from Saint Petersburg, Florida, at the entrance to Tampa Bay. Roosevelt had studied it in 1898, when his legendary Rough Riders were waiting to transfer to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War, so he knew firsthand the high quantity of both migratory and year-round birds using it.51
Now as president, with another “I So Declare It” decree on Florida’s behalf along the Gulf Coast, Roosevelt had helped every bird at Passage Key to continue to survive and thrive in its marine habitat. Slowly but steadily, the federal bird reservations grew. Many of his first reserves were in Florida—Indian Key, Mosquito Inlet, Tortugas Keys, Key West, Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, Palma Sole, and Island Bay. Roosevelt’s “Great Wildlife Crusade” also protected colonies of white-rumped sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, and piping plovers on the East Timbalier Island preserve in Louisiana; provided safe nesting grounds for herring gulls on the Huron Islands Reservation in Lake Superior three miles off the shore of Michigan; and offered sanctuary to the sooty and noddy terms on the Dry Tortugas Reservation in the Gulf of Mexico. At the Pathfinder Federal Bird Reservation in Wyoming—created on February 25, 1909, just before T.R. left office—the president not only saved an essential waterfowl migration stopover place on the western edge of the Central Flyway but also preserved herds of pronghorns, the fastest mammal in North America.
IV
When writing or lecturing about American birds Roosevelt often became lyrical, sometimes even songlike. His sparkling writings are often good enough to put him in the company of such first-rate naturalist writers as John Muir, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Peter Matthiessen, and John Burroughs. In 2008 the nature writer Bill McKibben included Roosevelt’s 1904 speech at the Grand Canyon in Library of America’s American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.52 “To lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm,” Roosevelt wrote in A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), “or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in the shifting maze above the beach—why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”53
During his presidency, Roosevelt also instituted the first federal