The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [314]
Recognizing that the concept of federal bird reservations was the best weapon against pluming, Dutcher staked NAAS’s future on creating sanctuaries like Pelican Island across America. Anger over Bradley’s death spun the feather wars plot. “If the National Association did no other work than to secure Bird Reservations and to guard them during the breeding season,” he said, “its existence would be fully warranted.”58
VII
There is no clear written record of how Paul Kroegel took the murder of Guy Bradley. All we know is that he retrieved the Audubon and continued to patrol Pelican Island in the boat he had built for Bradley. Flushed and confident in 1903 he boated out to Pelican Island with his aged father, Gotlobb, and posted two huge signs on the edge of Pelican Island, as instructed: “No Trespassing: U.S. Government Property.” They hoped these signs would deter plumers and others who would willfully or unknowingly harm the birds. Unfortunately, the huge signs had a deleterious effect on Pelican Island’s wildlife. In November–December 1903, the first winter after President Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” decree, the birds abandoned the rookeries—they just didn’t show up. Pelican Island was an avian ghost town, with only three or four ruffled vultures poking around the mudflat. It turned out that the signs had intimidated the pelicans, preventing them from landing. Recognizing the mistake and determined to lure the leery birds back, Kroegel, with help from his father and with the concurrence of Frank Chapman, dismantled the billboards in 1904. And just like that, the pelicans returned.
Meanwhile, Chapman returned to Pelican Island in the spring of 1904, 1905, 1908, and 1914. True to form, he kept detailed records of the rookery and reported his findings directly back to Roosevelt, with a professional air.59 Chapman’s elegant black-and-white pictures from those sojourns, ideal for lantern-slide presentations, constituted a high-water mark of nature photography during the progressive era. Emotionally invested in Pelican Island, Chapman was thrilled to learn that his friend Kroegel was still fearless, issuing citations although less frequently pointing his rifle at would-be encroachers. No longer was Kroegel viewed as a bird kook in Sebastian; after all, he was working for none other than President Roosevelt. In 1905, in fact, Kroegel’s local status took another leap upward when he was appointed county commissioner of the new Saint Lucie County by Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward. He held the office for the next fifteen years.
And Roosevelt continued pushing his agenda in Florida. One place in particular, Passage Key, seemed to have taken hold of Roosevelt’s imagination most firmly. Located offshore from Saint Petersburg, at the mouth of Tampa Bay, reachable only by boat, the Passage Key mangrove rookery had the largest nesting colonies of royal terms and sandwich terns in the entire state. There were so many whitish birds on the island that from above they looked like flocks of sheep corralled for market. Although royal and sandwich terns are difficult to distinguish from each other, royal terns are slightly larger and plumper, with an orange bill instead of a black one (yellow-tipped). Trained ornithologists like Roosevelt could also differentiate between them by the sounds they made. A royal tern made a shrill, rolling “keer-reet” whereas a sandwich tern went “kirr-ick.” Both species, however, were known for their wild chirrups when in distress.
When he was based in Tampa Bay in 1898, Roosevelt had grown fond of these terns. In the humid, stifling heat he had watched them fly over the bay with bills pointed downward, plunging into the water for black mullets, gray anchovies, and brown and white shrimp. Now, as president, he had an opportunity to do something permanent