The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [300]
Now, more than twenty years after Henshall’s disturbing report, Roosevelt was in a position to help save this little piece of Eden from destruction. As an honorary officer of the Florida Audubon Society and a former governor of New York who had helped promote the Lacey Act, he was well acquainted with the so-called Feather Wars going on in the state between bird protectionists and hunters. Now, with the the bully pulpit at his disposal, Roosevelt was finally going to put the plumers and eggers out of business once and for all. The main thrust of his policy was to strengthen the hand of the U.S. Biological Survey in Florida, perhaps having it oversee islets like Pelican Island. A new generation of Darwinists could use Florida as an evolutionary laboratory where plants might offer medical cures and breeding habits of birds could be carefully studied. But even if Roosevelt was able to create federal bird reservations on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of Florida, he would need wardens to protect them. Luckily, the ideal wildlife warden was already living in Sebastian, overlooking Pelican Island: Paul Kroegel, known locally as the “Audubon of the Indian River.” Roosevelt, it turned out, was Kroegel’s conservationist hero. Essentially, Kroegel became the archetype of the frontline law enforcement wardens Roosevelt wanted hired all over America to help protect birdlife. Therefore, Kroegel’s story illustrates a new trend in the wildlife protection movement that Roosevelt initiated in the hope of restoring bird species: federal wildlife protection officers.
II
Paul Kroegel—the man who would become Roosevelt’s first wildlife warden—was born in Chemnitz, Germany, on January 9, 1864. When he was three or four years old he became enamored of the gangly white storks (just as T.R. had been enamored of those in Dresden in 1869, when he “drew” Darwin’s theory with himself as a stork.) The sight of a stork nesting on a chimney was considered a good omen in both Chemnitz and Dresden. Also, because these migratory birds often arrived in Germany around Easter, the coming of the stork was, to northern Europeans of Teutonic ancestry, a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not only did German children like Paul Kroegel refrain from killing white storks; they thought of storks as holy birds imbued with eternal nobility. Germans, of course, weren’t the only Europeans to admire storks. According to ancient Greek mythology, a white stork was a fertility symbol. If a woman made direct eye contact with such a stork, she could receive the blessing of a newborn child. In Scandinavia white storks were believed to find human children (“stork children”) living in marshes or caves, to clutch them with their red claws, and to deliver them to the doorstep of pregnant women.5 In northern Germany storks were also thought to bring babies.6
This reverential attitude toward the long-legged birds was reinforced in young Kroegel by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic children’s story “The Storks.” Andersen, a Dane, was a veritable storehouse of stork mythology. Danish servants, for example, believed that if people saw a stork fly into town as spring approached they would soon move residences; if they saw a stork standing, they’d retain their current employment.7 When Andersen wrote “The Storks” in 1838, the rooftops of northern Europe provided nesting areas for them. In Andersen’s fairy tale, children who taunted a maimed stork were punished: a stork delivered a dead baby brother or sister in its long beak instead of a live baby. To a child of Kroegel’s generation, impressed by Andersen’s stories, hurting a stork would be akin to molesting the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.8
On a cold Christmas Eve in 1870, when Paul Kroegel was six years old, his mother and an infant