The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [445]
Tonto National Monument became part of the U.S. National Park Service in 1933. And the name of Theodore Roosevelt—attached to both the lake and the pottery—remained a major part of the monument’s appeal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MIGHTY BIRDS: THE FEDERAL RESERVATIONS OF 1907–1908
I
When Roosevelt received an advance copy of Reverend Herbert K. Job’s Wild Wings from Houghton Mifflin in 1905, illustrated with winsome photographs, it immediately served as an Auduboner-action impetus. Everything always seemed conditional on offshore bird rookeries but Job’s black-and-white photos of wild Florida—now housed at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut—had the permanence of fine art.1 To Roosevelt, Job’s photograph of man-o-wars wheeling through the air was worthy of the Louvre. With admirable precision, Job captured the biological traits of feisty terns and turbulent skimmers in all sorts of intriguing positions (both on the wing and at rest). Although Job was an amateur photographer, his birds nevertheless seemed alive with joy, and some almost seemed to have human traits. Because the young birds Job spied at Cape Sable and the Florida Keys were vulnerable to predators, he clicked and then scrammed to avoid disturbing their nest incubators.2
But photography was not Job’s only talent. Accompanying the pictures in Wild Wings was painstakingly accurate ornithological prose. (The excellent chapters “Following Audubon among the Florida Keys” and “The Great Cuthbert Rookery” had been previously published in Outing Magazine.) All of Job’s ornithological observations—whether written or presented as photographs—also offered topographical detail about pathless jungles of red and black mangrove; sea rocks teeming with chattering birds; and sandy white beaches with nesting burrows. This, of course, endeared Job to Roosevelt, who found him the real thing. Job wasn’t a fraud like the Reverend John Long, who claimed that egrets built casts for their broken legs and that robins chirped in Morse Code. Furthermore, in Wild Wings, Job promoted a sensible idea: “Every American Should Be a Game Warden” (a worthwhile precept for the “Citizen Bird” movement to follow). To Job, birds were windows into the soul of God; killing them for women’s hats was akin to blasphemy. Small birds, in particular, Job said, needed protection and love—people should feed them suet and seeds in winter to help survive zero weather.
Job was born in Boston during the Civil War. As a boy he used to take a skiff along Cape Cod, Block Island, and the Connecticut coast to study seabird colonies. The spots where they congregated mesmerized him. Before long he became a dedicated wildlife photographer. After earning an A.B. degree at Harvard in 1888, Job trained at the illustrious Hartford Theological Seminary to become a Congregationalist minister.3 His first pulpit was in North Middleboro, Massachusetts, before he relocated to Kent, Connecticut. Job was married and had a daughter. He shared with his family an unshakable enthusiasm for birds. Slowly but surely, he started bringing birds into his sermons. To him, birds’ nests were sacred incubators (“castles”) that needed to be designated “a safe refuge.”4 According to Job, citizens had a “holy obligation” to protect God’s little flight machines. Starting in the 1890s, armed with his trusty camera, Job photographed flocks along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, on the headlands of Nova Scotia, on the wet prairies of North Dakota, and along the banks of the Saskatchewan. Taking a factual approach to ornithology, he promoted the creation of federal bird reservations. He was something of an ornithological writing machine, and no bird was beneath his scrutiny;