The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [311]
VI
Kroegel now wore a badge issued by Roosevelt and had framed his diploma-like appointment letter with its raised seal (both courtesy of the Department of Agriculture). But this didn’t mean the Feather Wars of Florida were over in the spring of 1903. For starters, Pelican Island had decades before been shot out by plumer gangs. Seeking roseate spoonbill feathers in full spring color, they had sprayed bullets in every direction, leaving shattered bone and guts strewn about the mangrove islet. Not only did the adult roseate spoonbills die, but the young chicks, suddenly parentless, perished too. Essentially, two whole generations of these birds, among other unlucky species, were simultaneously wiped out.
Compounding Kroegel’s problem was the fact that plumers and eggers soon owned newfangled motorboats. Sailboats—even fine ones built by Kroegel—simply couldn’t keep up with a vessel that could move at forty or fifty miles per hour. Recognizing the disparity in speed, the Florida Audubon Society raised $300 for Kroegel to build a seaworthy twenty-three-foot-long boat fitted with a three-horsepower engine. The power boating era had truly arrived in the Indian River, and the Audubon Society wasn’t going to concede the technology edge to the opposition. The vessel commissioned by the Audubon Society was ideal for tropical seas, rain squalls, and storm-swept distances. Fueled by naphtha, an easily flammable oil product, the motorized Audubon was operative for warden-guide patrols around Florida’s tidal flats and mangrove keys a year before Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” decree. On July 15, 1902, William Dutcher sent Kroegel a telegram with an immediately pressing need for a motorboat.47
Guy Bradley, a former plume hunter, now a bird protector, was in desperate need of the motorized Audubon down in the Everglades. The AOU had just made Bradley a warden, too. He was something of an Everglades yokel, and his primary responsibilities as warden centered on the islands off Cape Sable—a watery prairie ecosystem at the southernmost point on the U.S. mainland. Here, in the shallow turtle grass flats and marshlands, the great white heron—a swan-white relative of the great blue heron—was making an impressive last stand. Nearly 500 nests of these rare birds had been counted, and there were probably many more.48 The AOU wanted them protected.
Kroegel rendezvoused with Bradley in Miami and turned over the stout little motorboat Audubon. The Audubon Society would pay any out-of-pocket costs incurred. Because Bradley kept a diary (even though it was irregular), we know that the handoff of the boat took place, albeit with a lot of hitches. Kroegel was a superior boatbuilder, but his knowledge of naphtha-fueled motors was very limited. As a result, the Audubon broke down after a relatively untaxing 230-mile trip. The outboard motor had seized, and the boat was dry-docked to work out the kinks.49
By September 1903, the Audubon, at long last, was in tip-top shape and Bradley began chasing plume hunters throughout the Ten Thousand Islands around the cape, venturing up the Shark and Rogers rivers, among others. The state authority made him feel empowered and reverent. After dropping a big mushroom anchor and running a stern line to a mangrove, Bradley, like a Wild West sheriff, would post “No Trespassing” and “Do Not Disturb the Birds” signs on every clam shack or fishing camp he encountered. Often his day companions were the peregrine falcons and bald eagles which coursed