The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [446]
By the time Roosevelt was president, Job had established himself as a popular ornithologist of note. This would prove propitious for both men. Job’s stock in trade—combining wildlife photographs with outdoorsman-like prose—was indebted to the sportsman style Roosevelt promoted in the Dakota trilogy. Not only had Job written a few poignant articles for Outing Magazine but he was an energizing force for the Connecticut Audubon Society. Still, as a writer, Job was only slightly above average: say, seven on a scale of one to ten. So when Wild Wings was published, naturalists rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Job had written a minor classic; wherever egrets, herons, and laughing gulls covered every inch of ground, he was in his element. As he wrote in Wild Wings, he would set up a pup tent and live with birds on islets for weeks on end. There were, for example, ten amazing shots of Florida pelicans—those Roosevelt favorites—in their black and red mangrove habitat, many taken at close range. For sheer exaltation, Job outdid even Frank M. Chapman. Some of the photos in Chapter 1 (“Cities of the Brown Pelicans”) actually came directly from the Pelican Island Federal Bird Reservation. Because Florida was bleached by sunlight, these photos had an impressive clarity. To Roosevelt, Chapters 2 and 3—“Following Audubon among the Florida Keys” and “In the Cape Sable Wilderness” were revelatory. Even Job’s photo of guano-whitened branches of mangrove interested him.
Cleverly, Job argued that saving the Florida Keys would be the most fitting memorial to the life and legacy of John James Audubon. Here Job found “rare and beautiful water-birds in amazing numbers, tropical islets with their dark mangroves, waving palms, and coral shores, waters prolific in fish and huge sea-turtles, with the soft southern zephyrs playing all over.” Job was as slender as a whip. He usually had field glasses at the ready. He wore a cropped mustache. His connection to the great Audubon wasn’t accidental. As a hook for Wild Wings, he had retraced Audubon’s Florida excursion of 1832 and provided a highly accurate bioregional update. The central difference was that Audubon had used a gun (and painted eighteen birds in Key West) whereas Job (with a camera) shot hundreds of photos. Audubon’s paintings are enduring classics. Many of Job’s photographs were only memorable: spoonbills wary of intruders, snowy egret just hatched, a young ibis nesting, and cormorants leaving a rookery. But Job pulled out all the stops in Wild Wings, even excerpting poetry verse from Byron, Bryant, Lanier, and Longfellow to further enhance the reader’s emotions. There were also meditations on the secrets of owls, instructions for the new sport of “hawking,” and descriptions of shore-patrolling against plumers killing golden plovers. And he championed government protection of rookeries. Like the AOU and the Audubon Society, Job pleaded with fashionable women to stop being induced by vendors to purchase hat and bonnet feathers.
“Here I felt I had reached the high-watermark of spectacular sights in the bird-world,” Job wrote after documenting Key West with his camera. “Wherever I may penetrate in future wanderings, I never hope to see anything to surpass, or perhaps to equal, that upon which I then grazed. Years ago such sights could be found all over Florida and other Southern States. This is the last pitiful remnant of hosts of innocent, exquisite creatures slaughtered for a brutal, senseless, yes criminal, millinery folly, decreed by Parisian butterflies, which many supposed free Americans slavishly follow. Florida has awakened to her loss, and imposes a very heavy fine for every one of these birds killed. Sincerely do I wish that every one who slaughters, or causes to be slaughtered these animated bits of winged poetry, may feel the full