The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [299]
Regularly Roosevelt would row around Long Island Sound on bird-watching adventures. He believed it was a civic responsibility to know the wildlife species that lived in your own backyard.
T.R. as a rower. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
While stationed in Tampa Bay during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had studied the brown pelicans’ daily routines with an artist’s eye for nuance. Often they glided low, within range of a pistol or slingshot, among swarms of gnats (locally known as sand flies) whose buzz may have been inaudible to humans but which nevertheless caused a man to itch. Sometimes the pelicans followed porpoises, which served as their advance agents for detecting schools of fish. Roosevelt had marveled at how good-humored pelicans could be, allowing noisy gulls to use their elongated heads as a resting spot.2 They built frail twig nests for roosts, and each pelican parent would take a turn sitting on the eggs and then dutifully standing guard, in shifts. They were a highly responsible bird species in this regard, rare and remarkable. And pelicans were just one of Florida’s wild creatures Roosevelt admired. Someday he hoped his grandchildren would see loggerhead turtles laying eggs on a Florida beach and manatees patrolling the crystal waters of a spring-fed river. To Roosevelt there was no more nutritive truth than the order of the Abrahamic God four days after Genesis to “let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly over the land across the vault of heaven.”
Roosevelt first learned about the birds of Pelican Island from the published field notes of Dr. Henry Bryant (of the Boston Society of Natural History), recorded in 1859. Dr. Bryant, in his capacity as a professional ornithologist, scientifically recorded the scores of brown pelicans and other waterbirds he encountered on fantastically misshapen clumps of mangrove in the Indian River Lagoon. “The most extensive breeding place was on a small island called Pelican Island, about twenty miles north of Fort Capron,” Bryant wrote in his diary. “The nests here were placed on the tops of mangrove trees, which were about the size and shape of large apple trees. Breeding in company with the pelicans were thousands of herons, Peale’s egret, the rufous egret and little white egret, with a few pairs of the great blue heron and roseate spoonbills; and immense numbers of man-o-war birds and white ibises were congregated upon the island.”3 Bryant also reported that a feather hunter had recently killed sixty roseate spoonbills on Pelican Island in a single day.
The word soon spread in ornithologist circles that Pelican Island was an amazing field laboratory; there was little need to venture down to Ecuador or British Honduras. In 1879 Dr. James Henshall, following in Bryant’s footsteps, visited the Indian River Lagoon region on a collection trip, expecting the best. Traversing trails that became a trough of swamp water to get to Pelican Island, Henshall was astounded by what he encountered: the mythical rookery was now a dead zone. “The mangroves and water oaks of this island have all been killed by the excrement of the pelicans which breed here,” Henshall wrote in his journal. “This guano, which lies several inches deep on the ground, is utilized by the settlers as an efficient fertilizer. At a distance, the dead trees and bushes and ground seemed covered with frost or snow, and thousands of brown pelicans were seen flying and swimming around or perched upon the dead branches.