The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [453]
Writing years later in Nature Magazine about the federal bird reservation movement in the Pacific Northwest during the Roosevelt era, Finley offered a succinct rationale for west coast bird refuges in wetlands (not just on oceanic rocks). “A very large number of lakes and ponds have been drained and many swamps have been dried up under the guise of making agricultural land,” Finley wrote. “With the gradual spread of population, each year the migratory flocks return to former nesting sites, only to find them destroyed, and their natural food supply diminished. The vital point today in wild fowl preservation is that a goodly number of the remaining lakes, ponds, and swamps must be preserved. No matter how many game laws we have or how rigidly these are enforced birds, like people, cannot live without homes and many species are sure to be pushed to the point of final disappearance.”31
Because Washington and Oregon weren’t overly populated (after all, they got about 140 inches of rain annually) and the extraction operations were just beginning along the Pacific Northwest coast, Roosevelt had been able to make a preemptive strike on behalf of wildlife in 1907 with Three Arch Rocks, followed by the three Washington state bird rock archipelagos and the waterfowl marshes of Oregon. On the same numerologist’s dream of a day (08/08/08) that Klamath Lake was established, so too was Key West. Florida, in 1908, proved far more difficult. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was ready to methodically finish the job he had started at Pelican Island, Passage Key, and Indian Key. Outfoxing his opponents every step of the way, confusing them with his embrace of both hunting and preservationist polarities, Roosevelt issued one executive order after another from February to October 1908 to save sites in Florida such as Mosquito Inlet, Dry Tortugas, Key West, Pine Island, Palma Sola, Matlacha Pass, and Island Bay.32
Just as Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle spurred Roosevelt to issue laws regulating meatpacking, Wild Wings saved birdlife in Florida. Understanding that in the tropics residents sometimes resorted to slash-and-burn practices, the president moved quickly to protect “Florida’s wildlife heritage.” No salt prairie, coral reef, mangrove thicket, or bird rock was precluded from the Biological Survey’s consideration. And Roosevelt had the congressional ruling of June 28, 1906, about not disturbing or trespassing on federal bird Reservations, to work with as a legal deterrent in Florida. Not that it was foolproof—the congressional order was frequently defied. A deranged Floridian, for example, shot four of Roosevelt’s pelicans on Mosquito Inlet, claiming that the refuges were illegal. The courts ruled in favor of the Roosevelt administration.33 The assailant pleaded guilty and paid a steep fine.
This was a time of profound, positive change in the Florida wildlife protection movement. Numerous islands along Florida’s Gulf of Mexico and every bird rookery along the Atlantic Ocean now had aesthetic value to Roosevelt. He would have to save them from the persistent ignorance of the ex-Confederate yokels and from railroad executives like Henry Flagler. In An Autobiography, Roosevelt listed his most notable wildlife protection achievements in Chapter II, “The Natural Resources of the Nation.” Among them, Florida ranked high. In particular, he saved the West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris) at Mosquito Inlet in Volusia County, about eighty miles from Orlando. Roosevelt hoped to create “safe havens” throughout Florida where these manatees could live unmolested, as President Ulysses S.