The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [306]
The ornithologist Frank M. Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History did more to save Florida’s bird rookeries than anyone else in American history. He successfully lobbied President Roosevelt to create federal bird reservations.
Frank M. Chapman. (Courtesy of the American Museum of National History)
Reading Bird Studies was an inspiration for Kroegel. He quickly recognized that Chapman was a kindred spirit like none other, a self-taught ornithologist of deep learning and forbearance. They were, to his mind, a fraternity of two. All the brown pelicans’ habits Kroegel had observed daily from his homestead at Indian River were extolled in gorgeous naturalist prose in Chapman’s Bird Studies. “No traveler ever entered the gates of a foreign city with greater expectancy than I felt as I stepped from my boat on the muddy edge of this City of the Pelicans,” Chapman wrote. “The old birds, without a word of protest, deserted their homes, leaving their eggs and young at my mercy. But the young were as abusive and threatening as their parents were silent and unresisting. Some were on the ground, others in the bushy mangroves, some were coming from the egg, others were learning to fly; but one and all—in a chorus of croaks, barks, and screams, which rings in my ears whenever I think of the experience—united in demanding that I leave town.”28
There—in precise ornithological prose—was Kroegel’s daily reason for skippering a boat around Pelican Island but seldom walking on the sanctuary. In Chapman he had found his own highly personal Thoreau. Chapman had written that brown pelicans had a “dignified way,” that the island was their “metropolis.” Kroegel liked that kind of descriptive imagery. After spending four full days on the roost, Chapman wrote, “During no hour of the twenty-four did silence reign.” The sharp-eyed New Yorker even knew that pelicans liked to flap their broad wings for ten or eleven straight beats. As far as Kroegel knew, nobody, besides himself, had ever done that arithmetic before. And therein is what floored him about Bird Studies. Chapman had done the math. The esteemed ornithologist had counted 251 nests during his stay in March 1898 and then broke the total down as follows:
55 nests with 1 egg each
63 " " 2 eggs " "
23 " " 3 eggs " "
63 " " 1 young each;
46 " " 2 young each;
Such field calculations enthralled Kroegel. He thought Chapman was spot-on with his estimate of 2,736 pelicans for the island. The famous ornithologist had also captured the glory of what it sounded like to hear a pelican hatch, calling the young chicks’ first noise on earth a “choking bark.”29 Besides writing about Pelican Island in Bird Studies, Chapman, under Roosevelt’s urging, gave public presentations with stereopticon slides in Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York, bringing the plight of Florida’s tidewater rookeries to a wider audience. He even kept a “bird count” of species he saw women wearing as apparel on Fifth Avenue. In one hour of one day in 1885, he identified 174 birds of forty different species adorning ladies’ hats. In his lectures, he would verbally confront such women for indulging a penchant for precious feathers. Chapman implored them to switch over to domesticated ostrich feathers, which could be plucked or collected without hurting the bird. He had done so himself at an ostrich farm in Florida. The feathers from these flightless birds—celebrated for their fleet-footedness by ancient Egyptian kings—were gorgeous, ideal for hats, decor, and masks. If a woman really wanted to strike a theatrical pose, Chapman would say, then she should don an ostrich feather.
IV
One afternoon Kroegel actually got a chance to meet the mild-mannered, owlish Chapman, who resided at the Oak Lodge in Micco, Florida. The ten-bedroom boardinghouse—situated