The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [310]
There was, however, a hiccup. Because the Department of Agriculture had no money earmarked for wardens, the Audubon Society stepped in and paid for Kroegel’s modest salary: one dollar a month. (A couple of years later the Department of Agriculture gave Kroegel a substantial raise, to twelve dollars a month.43) But Paul never balked at the low salary. He was now Warden Kroegel. That’s what mattered. Although he had voluntarily protected wildlife on Pelican Island for years, Kroegel now held the distinction of being America’s first “refuge manager.” On April 28, 1903, Dutcher wrote Kroegel with a laundry list of federal instructions, noting that at all costs he was to “prevent the killing of wild birds or taking of their eggs,” and adding that any violations of President Roosevelt’s executive order should be “reported at once.”44
Word had been delivered loud and clear: President Roosevelt wanted the plumers and eggers flushed. Following Roosevelt’s executive order a ferocious federal crackdown on market hunters rocked Florida. Roosevelt actually relished using the rule of law to incarcerate all the plumers and eggers who could be found. “His sense of right and duty was as inflexible as adamant,” John Burroughs wrote in his diary. “Politicians found him a hard customer.”45
When Kroegel heard that Pelican Island had become a federal bird reservation he matter-of-factly lit his pipe to celebrate. His son Rodney later said he was in a kind of controlled stupor, half-imagining that the Pelican Island decree was a parlor trick from Washington, bound to be revoked. There was, however, no hocus-pocus. The opening salvo in the crusade to save American wildlife had been fired by President Roosevelt. When Warden Kroegel now pointed a rifle muzzle at a pelican poacher, he was doing so with the full authority of the president of the United States. Once again, Roosevelt’s genius as a conservationist was that he never listened to other politicians about how to get things done. His instinct was always to turn to the professional biologists, foresters, and field naturalists first. He always consulted with Darwin-minded men like Chapman, Dutcher, or Pinchot and then acted. Once the biological imperative was established he engaged the rough-and-ready outback types like Kroegel. Over and over again, this was the formula Roosevelt used to eventually set aside more than 234 million acres of America for posterity.
With reserved pride, and a sense of genuine responsibility, as of April 1 Warden Kroegel proudly flew a huge American flag—which the USDA had sent him—on a twelve-foot pole at the end of his long dock at Indian River Lagoon. The instructions from the Roosevelt administration had been for Kroegel to put the gigantic flag on the island itself as an unmistakable federal warning to all encroachers. But Kroegel worried that the bright red-white-and-blue flag might scare away the birds. So the flimsy wooden dock it was. The Kroegel homestead now had the look of a U.S. Coast Guard customhouse. “Folks would be more inclined to not mess with the birds if they saw that flag,” his granddaughter Janice Kroegel Timinsky recalled. “It was his way of saying, ‘Don’t tread here.’”46 The flag also served as a sentinel. When boats sailed past, they would invariably give a patriotic salute by sounding their horns. This alerted Kroegel to head off potential vandals.
Just a couple of months after saving Pelican Island as the first federal bird reservation, Roosevelt decided that he should pay a long-overdue courtesy visit to the author of Florida Game Birds at Lotus Lake on Long Island’s South