The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [302]
Paul Kroegel, who faced off against plume hunters in the 1900s, was a pioneer in wildlife conservation not only for Florida, but for the entire nation.
Paul Kroegel. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
Keeping vigil over birds, however, wasn’t a livelihood. As with just about all the first-generation settlers in post–Civil War Florida, Kroegel’s primary source of revenue came from farming. Besides beans, citrus groves kept the Kroegels in the black. Within eight years of moving to Sebastian—through perseverance and good seed—the Kroegels were among the most prosperous growers in Florida.14 Sometimes, however, the citrus and bean crops couldn’t survive the deadly frost that blew in around Christmas. A single “big freeze” could cover a year’s worth of agricultural labor in an icy, deadly crust. Priding himself on beating back the frost, wrapping his trees in burlap, Kroegel defiantly grew grapefruit and oranges on his 143 acres of Indian River property when other, less determined farmers had abandoned their crop.* He also tended more than 100 beehives, selling his homegrown honey at a tiny roadside stand. These Florida bees weren’t transported from Europe (like those in New England) but were true “Aborigines.”15 And scarcely a week went by when Kroegel wasn’t scything through dense hammocks to cut a trail, sometimes for extra pay and at other times just for the sake of reclamation. “Even though he had a wife and kids,” his grandson Douglas Kroegel recalled, “it seemed it was those birds and trails he cared about the most. Even more than his kids. He was on a mission to put the bad guys [plumers] out of business on Pelican Island no matter what it took.”16
As Kroegel approached his thirty-ninth birthday in 1903, he wondered why the federal government wasn’t stopping the massacre of these Pelican Island birds. After all, Washington, D.C., owned the island and half a dozen adjacent smaller keys in Indian River. Didn’t the Lacey Act prohibit such reckless slaughter? Couldn’t the Roosevelt administration ban it on federal property? Shouldn’t the new law against killing pelicans be enforced as the one in Chemnitz was for storks? Wouldn’t it be smart to create a bird reserve? Just asking these questions made Kroegel an irregular character in the fishing community of Sebastian. With his steely gaze, huge droopy mustache, and blistered boatbuilder’s hands, Kroegel, a father of two, cut an imposing figure for a man only five feet six inches tall. His round face had developed a network of wrinkles, accentuated by a deep year-round tan. Uninterested in clothes, Kroegel often wore heavy wool garments (including sweaters) and Sunday serge in the torrid sun to avoid being “eaten alive” by mosquitoes, which were also considered potential carriers of malaria.17 He often carried an accordion with him to play at weddings and anniversary parties. To the Indian River fishermen in search of juvenile snappers and snook, the pipe-smoking Kroegel was a misanthrope of sorts. Sebastian back then had something of a Jamaican tang. The air smelled of seaweed, freshwater catch, guano, and horse dung. Local seafarers and dirt farmers sat around with basins of fish in the heat, repairing nets; they ostracized Kroegel for being so indignant about plume hunters bagging egrets and gunning down the fish-stealing pelicans which roosted and nested as thick as bats on the treeless Pelican Island rookery.
Like Audubon—who had tramped around the Gulf’s southern tidal swamps—Kroegel would get a careful fix on each bird’s unique temperament, silently crawling up close to measure habits such as skittishness, sociability, and cunning. Colonial waterbirds preferred to nest in colonies, grouping closely together for protection from predators. They particularly liked nesting on thick mangrove clumps, where they could