The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [194]
Roosevelt also worked side by side with Merriam on abolishing the unsportsmanlike practice of chasing deer to the water’s edge with packs of hounds in the Adirondack Park. This was a conservationist project in which they could be brothers in arms. The two men also wanted to ban the new practice of jacklighting (shining a spotlight into flocks of ducks which stunned so they could not fly off, and then firing away). As noted, in 1884 Merriam had written The Mammals of the Adirondacks Region of Northeastern New York, a careful examination of that area’s fauna. The Boone and Crockett Club recommended the book for sportsmen; and Roosevelt praised it in Trail and Camp-Fire. Offering an olive branch to Merriam in the public sphere, throwing out grand praise, Roosevelt called the federal biologist a “field naturalist in the highest sense of the term; the model of what we ought to have for the entire American continent.” 87
But Roosevelt’s interest in Adirondack deer wasn’t simply a matter of rebonding with Merriam. The declining deer population in those home-state woodlands troubled him. Like Uncle Rob, Theodore wanted to protect the Hudson River watershed by not cutting down too many trees—at times it seemed that most of the topsoil of upstate New York was ending up in Manhattan’s harbor. In 1897, after a concerted lobbying effort, the New York legislature enacted a law to protect deer. Proper wildlife management, Roosevelt boasted, truly got extraordinary results. “We set to work ridding the Adirondacks of the [hunting] dogs,” the New York conservationist John Burnham recalled of Roosevelt and Merriam’s push, “and it was a thrilling, dangerous job.”88
A year after the bans on dogs and jacklighting went into affect, the Adirondack deer and ducks started to rebound. In an early experiment in wildlife relocation, trapped deer from Maine were taken to upstate New York and let loose. The repopulation commenced as hoped for. (A similar reintroduction with buffalo, moose, and elks, however, failed). Still, Roosevelt was thrilled that his Adirondacks deer were being revived through a combination of wildlife and forestry law. Former president Benjamin Harrison, in fact, had just built a sporting home in the Adirondacks called Berkeley Lodge. Along with Roosevelt and Merriam, Harrison was a high-level proponent of the “Forever Wild” movement to save the Adirondacks from destruction. And he spoke up on behalf of deer, too. Starting in 1897 Roosevelt once again began exploring the region for bird sightings in hopes of updating his nearly twenty-year-old Summer Birds of the Adirondacks; he never, however, found the time.
Extraordinarily fine essays on hunting in Africa and Newfoundland were included in Trail and Camp-Fire when it was published in late 1897. On the book’s cover was a moose head with record-size antlers; the title page had an amateurish illustration of a mountain goat standing on a rock ledge. The volume’s scope was ambitious. On the conservationist front, the editors—Roosevelt and Grinnell—took up the cudgels for saving Adirondack deer by championing many new laws. There was also a self-congratulatory essay on the founding of the Bronx Zoo. Finally, Roosevelt once again provided a list of the essential natural history books all true-blue hunters and serious explorers needed to read. Four essays in this fat book—including Roosevelt’s “The Bear’s Disposition”—dealt with bear hunting and protection issues.
Grinnell’s own contribution, the long essay “Wolves and Wolf Nature,” was simply brilliant. It could have been published as a monograph instead of in an anthology. “In discussing wild animals, we are all very disposed to consider the species as a whole, and to deal in general terms, jumping to the conclusion that all the individuals of a kind are exactly alike, and