The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [305]
By the time Roosevelt became president Chapman’s advocacy for “citizen bird” found a literary outlet in a revolutionary little book, which tried to turn the “sportsman’s ethos” on its head. That year Chapman published Bird Studies with a Camera, complete with more than 100 photographs taken by the author himself. This was the kind of evolved birding that Roosevelt approved of—take a photo of the brown pelicans or herons and leave your gun at home. It anticipated eco-tourism and international birding. What Chapman had attempted to do—and by and large succeeded in doing—was to use his camera as “an aid in depicting the life histories of birds.” Sometimes, instead of merely photographing a chickadee at a nest hole or young herons on branches seventy feet from the ground, Chapman would also capture images of their habitat—an application of his philosophy regarding museum displays. “A photograph of a marsh or woods showing the favorite haunts of a species,” Chapman wrote, “is worth more than pages of description.”25
Few wildlife enthusiasts could quarrel with the good intentions of Chapman’s expansive, habitat-conscious nature photography. Most, however, as the modest sales of Bird Studies with a Camera indicated, probably still preferred one of the approximately 430 drawings in Audubon’s Birds of America to Chapman’s photograph of a puffin’s burrow (minus the bird). And their reasoning wasn’t simply a matter of aesthetic pleasure. Real hunters, not the riffraff who slaughtered nesting birds for money, found something missing from Chapman’s philosophy—the chase. To Chapman’s everlasting credit, he bravely confronted the “chase issue” in his proactive book through a combination of salesmanship (with regard to photography) and ridicule (of plume hunting). The essential message of Bird Studies with a Camera was something like “Real men don’t kill little helpless uneatable things for sport.” But true outdoorsmen, like those responsible for Adirondack Park and Crater Lake National Park, didn’t kill shorebirds or songbirds anyway. In some ways Chapman was preaching to the converted. “I can affirm that there is a fascination about the hunting of wild animals with a camera as far ahead of the pleasure to be derived from their pursuit with shotgun or rifle as the sport found in shooting Quail is beyond that of breaking clay ‘Pigeons’” he wrote. “Continuing the comparison, from a sportsman’s standpoint, hunting with a camera is the highest development of man’s inherent love of the chase.”26
That argument seemed reasonable enough. But it wasn’t convincing to true-blue hunters: they refused to feel ashamed of preferring taxidermy to the darkroom. You could almost hear the dismissive grumble from late-nineteenth-century sportsmen piqued about Chapman’s advocacy of the camera. Chapman’s argument, they believed, was a ruse, like comparing apples and oranges. About a third of the way into his book—at which point his ideas were already rejected by most sportsmen—the high-minded Chapman lowered the boom regarding a wildlife protection. “The killing of a bird with a gun,” he wrote, “seems little short of murder after one has attempted