The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [283]
Owing to President Roosevelt’s foresight and action, when the Luquillo National Forest celebrated its centennial in 2003 the Puerto Rican parrot was still surviving—though barely. And the forest had expanded to 28,000 protected acres. In April 2004 Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, urged by environmental groups and Puerto Rican constituents, introduced a bill to add further environmental protection measures to save endangered species in the Luquillo (in 2007 it was renamed El Yunque National Forest). Clinton lamented the decline of the endangered Puerto Rican parrot. “Today,” she said, “there are fewer than thirty-five of these parrots.”40 But she added that with the increased financing of two entities essentially created by Roosevelt—the National Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the parrots might once again thrive in the most spectacular rain forest in the Caribbean. At the USDA-run visitor center in the Yunque National Forest a huge blown-up copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 proclamation declaring Luquillo a national forest has been installed as an exhibit.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. with a favorite parrot.
Ted Roosevelt Jr. with parrot. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Hearing about the beautiful parrots in both Puerto Rico and the Philippines fascinated Roosevelt to no end. Parrots, he believed, were deeply complex creatures with the intelligence of a human three- to five-year-old. Their startling plumage was far more interesting to him than a luminous splash in a painting by Monet or Renoir. Before long, unable to resist, the president acquired parrots as pets. “Loretta, the parrot, has fairly become one of the household,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit in January 1904. “I had no idea that parrots could become so social and intelligent. The other day Archie was in bed with a headache. I found Mame sitting beside the bed and Loretta in her cage between them on my bed. She was having a most lovely time, with the feathers on her head and neck ruffled up, chuckling and talking away in low tones, and alternately shaking hands with first one and then the other of her companions. She was evidently as pleased as she could be, and upon my word, of the three I felt as if at the moment she was intellectually taking the lead herself.”41
Besides Loretta there was also a blue-yellow macaw known as Eli Yale (kept in the greenhouse), which Roosevelt said “looked as if he came out of Alice in Wonderland.”42 Roosevelt loved teaching Eli Yale—so named because its colors were those of Yale University—words like “dee-lighted” and his children’s names. Sometimes it would scream and make a piercing flock call. Occasionally after White House dinners, Roosevelt would head out to the greenhouse to feed both Eli Yale and Loretta table scraps, particularly dried fruits and vegetables. Both parrots were friends with the well-fed domestic hen Baron Spreckle, who Roosevelt noticed was starting to act like a parrot. Having these birds around the White House and Sagamore Hill helped keep Roosevelt engaged as a Darwinian zoologist—or, as Edith claimed, returning him to his boyhood. “If all the animals and birds which have been sent by admiring friends as gifts to the President and members of his family had been allowed to remain at the White House,” a popular magazine surmised, “that historic old structure might easily be turned into a menagerie and the grounds surrounding it into a zoological park.”43
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CRATER LAKE AND WIND CAVE NATIONAL PARKS
I
Forest reserves weren’t all that President Roosevelt was preserving for prosperity. As a fervent enthusiast of national parks, Roosevelt hoped to establish