The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [447]
To Roosevelt, Wild Wings was filled with fascinating bird lore. It was irresistible to read what an authentic bird-watcher and bird saver—not the faker Long—had presented. But Job could never have been a member of the Boone and Crockett Club. The systematic brutality of hunting—all that bubbling blood—never appealed to his Christian sensibility. Leaving his shotgun at home in Connecticut, Job had gone to Florida with a camera which registered in one-thousandth of a second (it had a long-focused four-by-five-inch plate).7 He was an Auduboner on a mission, and his church, according to the Congregationalist and Christian World newsletter, actually paid for his trips to Florida. They were a fine investment. 8 He was going to prove that Floridians were terribly shortsighted for allowing vandals, eggers, developers, and plumers to massacre herons, egrets, pelicans, and other birds. As a leader in Connecticut’s Audubon movement, he had an obligation to lead this crusade.
Roosevelt was enthralled by the ornithologist Herbert K. Job’s Wild Wings. Job’s photographs—like these of baby pelicans and handsome cormorants on sea rocks—were used by Roosevelt to promote the “citizen bird” movement. Roosevelt declared that to kill one of these Florida birds indiscriminately was akin to murder.
Herbert K. Job photos. (Courtesy of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut)
Roosevelt sent Job a heartfelt congratulatory letter on White House stationery. He had admired Job’s earlier book Among the Water-Fowl (1902) and now thanked his “fellow Harvard Man” for the “exceedingly interesting” book. Not only was Roosevelt inspired to save more of subtropical Florida by creating federal bird reservations, but he also admitted the folly of using guns rather than cameras when engaging in outdoor adventures. “I have been delighted with it,” Roosevelt wrote to Job about Among the Water-Fowl, “and I desire to express to you my sense of the good which comes from such books as yours and from the substitution of the camera for the gun. The older I grow the less I care to shoot anything except ‘varmints.’ I do not think it at all advisable that the gun should be given up, nor does it seem to me that shooting wild game under proper restrictions can be legitimately opposed by any who are willing that domestic animals shall be kept for food; but there is altogether too much shooting, and if we can only get the camera in place of the gun and have the sportsman sunk somewhat in the naturalist and lover of wild things, the next generation will see an immense change for the better in the life of our woods and waters.” In a handwritten postscript Roosevelt confessed that he was “still something of a hunter, although a lover of wild nature first!”9
An ecstatic Job persuaded his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to print Roosevelt’s letter about Among the Water-Fowl as the introduction to Wild Wings. The first-edition book cover was an elegant green-turquoise with golden seabirds in flight embossed on the front, back, and spine; its now a presidential collector’s item.
The influence of Among the Water-Fowl and Wild Wings went far beyond the ornithological community. With the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the National Forest Decree of 1907 as the newest weapons in the his preservationist-conservationist arsenal, Roosevelt once again turned hard to wildlife protection by means of federal bird reservations. Spurred on by the Job books, Roosevelt vowed to stop the precipitous decline in avian species such as man-o-wars, albatrosses, and loons. It didn’t hurt to have a noted clergyman cheering his efforts on from the sidelines. “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune,” Roosevelt said in Outlook, “as the lack of power to take joy in books.”10
From August 8, 1907, to October 26, 1908, in fact, there were eighteen new “I So Declare It” federal bird sanctuaries. There were no stentorian speeches about these reserves from the president, or from Dr. Merriam or Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson.