The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [313]
Like all colonial birds, double-crested cormorants congregated on islands close to shore. Easily detectable even by a novice bird-watcher because of their shiny black and bronze plumage, cormorants were considered a nuisance by fisherfolk. In the spring and summer many of these long-necked aquatic birds nested along Florida’s coast, while others migrated southward to Florida from more northern nesting grounds. What Roosevelt found fascinating about cormorants—the trait which gave him the most delight—was the way they dived and remained submerged for a long time. Scanning underwater for fish or shrimp, they seldom reappeared with an empty beak. As a Darwinian naturalist he was deeply intrigued that the bird had adapted to underwater life so strikingly.
Roosevelt worried that the disreputable plumers of Florida—“sordid bird-butchers” he later called them in his postpresidential A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open—were trying to exterminate the double-crested cormorants just as they did the brown pelicans.54 Fishermen, he knew, were worried about depleted shellfish harvesting areas and saw cormorants as competition. The future of cormorants, he believed, was imperiled. If federal intervention didn’t occur, they were headed toward near-extinction. Proactive measures had to be taken quickly. Consulting with ornithologists like Chapman and Dutcher, Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted cormorants protected, even if the U.S. Biological Survey had to hire more wardens quickly.
Somewhat unsteadily, Bradley approached the Smith gang at Oyster Keys, demanding that they drop their guns. He was the law and had come there to make arrests. From the moment he spoke, he was greeted with resistance. A quarrel ensued over whether an arrest warrant was necessary on the waterways; meanwhile, wounded birds, in a frenzy, let out a terrified chant. The initial tension heightened to ferocity. Harsh words were spoken. As the dispute intensified, a sharpshooter in the Smith gang suddenly shot Bradley in the chest, as if he had been wearing a bull’s-eye on his work shirt. “He never knew what hit him,” Walter Smith, head of the gang, the murderer, later told the police. Bradley slumped forward in the bow, bleeding profusely, motionless. His dinghy drifted westward in the slate-gray water. It journeyed over a reef, away from Oyster Keys and out to sea. The corpse of Bradley disappeared into the distant horizon as the Smith gang stood and watched from the shore.55 Bradley had died a martyr in the line of duty, murdered trying to stop an outlaw plumer gang.56
Warden Guy Bradley was murdered in Florida for trying to protect bird rookeries from plume hunters.
Warden Guy Bradley. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
The National Association of Audubon Societies (NAAS) immediately protested the cold-blooded murder of Guy Bradley, to draw even more attention to the menace of Florida’s rookery killers. Outraged, Roosevelt predictably promised not to cower or retreat in the face of the murder. Instead, he appointed more Department of Agriculture wardens in Florida (in a collaborative venture with the Audubon Society) and grew even more determined to create federal bird reservations (U.S. wildlife refugees) to protect cormorants, pelicans, herons, egrets, and other nongame birds. His belief in the Audubon Society’s mission, in fact, now increased tenfold. “Permit me on behalf of both Mrs. Roosevelt and myself to say how heartily we sympathize not only with the work of