The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [449]
When considering these Pacific Northwest refuges, it’s important the reader keep in mind that their preservation received little attention from the general public or the press in 1907. It’s probably safe to say that 95 percent of Americans had never heard of the Biological Survey, and 99.9 percent had never read a word about Job’s bird rookeries. But the Biological Survey and Job were on the front line of the bird protection movement. And from 1885 to 1905 the Biological Survey issued twenty-three separate monographs on North American fauna—though how many were read was another question.13
Modernity, in general, didn’t work in harmony with the Biological Survey’s concern for saving bird flocks and faunal habitats. Forests were being destroyed by logging, depriving birds of essential habitats. An ugly ramification of the telegraph and telephone lines crisscrossing North America was that birds died en masse by flying directly into them. Ernest Harold Baynes—a popular figure in buffalo preservation circles since the successful creation of Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains reserve—wrote in Wild Bird Guests that the new Statue of Liberty in New York harbor was a bird trap, killing 1,400 on a single morning.14 Skyscrapers, in general, were deplored by the Audubon Society. This fear of overindustrialization, long articulated by Burroughs, convinced Roosevelt that he should establish a coordinated system of bird refuges from the Pacific Northwest to the prairie in North Dakota, and from the upper reaches of Lake Huron to the coral reefs of the Florida Keys. Starting in 1903 (with Pelican Island), every year the USDA’s Biological Survey issued an annual report, in which bird reservations established for aesthetic reasons were given noticeably more space than animal control. Wildlife protection had taken hold in the Biological Survey in a way that would have been unthinkable before Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency.15 According to Aldo Leopold, in Game Management, because of the “Roosevelt Doctrine” of conservation, the “game hog” and the “market hunter” were “duly pilloried in the press and banquet hall, and to some extent in field and wood, but the game supply continued to wane.”16
Besides poachers, plumers, and eggers the first federal bird reservations along coastal areas—bird cities—had to confront the hazard of bad weather. Even a warden with a shiny USDA badge was no deterrent to winds of 130 or 140 miles per hour. The Biological Survey’s annual report for 1907, for example, told of nonhuman difficulties the USDA had at Breton Island in Louisiana. “The islands composing this reservation were visited and somewhat damaged by a severe tropical hurricane which swept the Gulf of Mexico in 1906,” the report noted glumly. “Breton Island, six miles in length, was split into three parts, and although normally standing twelve feet above water was flooded throughout its whole extent. Many thousands of pelicans were destroyed by being dashed to the ground by the wind. A beneficial feature of the storm, however, was the extermination of the raccoons and muskrats, which had infested the island and which annually wrought considerable havoc among the nesting birds.”17
Roosevelt’s passionate interest in saving the birds of coastal Washington and Oregon grew out of his trip to Portland, Oregon, and Puget Sound, Washington,