The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [448]
The remoteness of these Gulf locations greatly intrigued Roosevelt. When there was free time on his calendar, he hoped to inspect the totality of the small Gulf islands and sandy keys thickly covered with seabirds’ nests. Roosevelt particularly liked black skimmers (called razorbills in the south Gulf) and wanted to visit these outer islands in June when the great flocks deposited eggs. The heavy surf and heavy onshore wind sounded like a pick-me-up to him. The woolly clouds in the Gulf moved, at dusk, with a galvanic speed that drove up rain. He hoped that Job would soon accompany him on the south Gulf excursion. Roosevelt joked that the only thing better than a clergyman in your corner, covering your action, was a physician. Bird-watching in the Gulf of Mexico with Warden William Sprinkle of Biloxi, Mississippi, and Reverend Herbert K. Job of Kent, Connecticut, as his guides on the outer islands of Louisiana was his latest idea of a splendid open-air holiday on the edge.
Job began doing advance work for this possible trip. Traveling southward, he gathered data for Roosevelt about tarpon and other game fish, the migration of bay birds, and the egg-laying of sea turtles. This scouting also afforded Job the opportunity to befriend Warden Sprinkle, whom he affectionately called “protector of the Gulf birds.” As an assignment for Outing Magazine in 1907, Job wrote “Curiosities of Louisiana Sea Islands,” an article that Roosevelt loved. Job was announcing to the world that his beloved Theodore Roosevelt—the ornithologist president—was heroically protecting America’s flyways from unwelcome human encroachment.11
According to the Biological Survey’s Annual Report of 1908, Roosevelt didn’t create Tern Island, Shell Keys, and East Timbalier Island at random. He was concerned about effluence from the mouth of the Mississippi River. Besides birds, marine life filled Tern Island, Shell Keys, and East Timbalier. Single-cell animals, jellyfish, and copepods were omnipresent. Billions of types of plankton—many still not identified by scientists—kept the food chain thriving. As a bonus, a perceptive beachcomber on these Louisiana islands could discover amazing rocks, fossils, shells, coral, and bones. A botanist could marvel at bayberry or wax myrtle. The currents and undertows around these outer islands, however, made them treacherous for the seafaring novice. With just the slightest change in weather a breaker, like a small waterfall, could rush up on the unsuspecting novice’s vessel and swamp it. In June 1915, as ex-president, Roosevelt visited these isolated barrier islands with both Job and Sprinkle as companions.
II
From the Louisiana islands Roosevelt, for the first time, moved west of the Mississippi River with his idea of federal bird reservations. Under the instructive guidance of Job, Chapman, and Dutcher, Roosevelt matter-of-factly developed a bold Oregon-Washington strategy for the Biological Survey to implement with environmental interconnectedness in mind. And there was one inflexible rule: once the Roosevelt administration created a federal reservation, it didn’t tolerate plumers, seal hunters, or human menaces of any other kind. The refuges were official U.S. government property policed by wardens paid by the Audubon Societies and AOU (with money