The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [454]
Exactly when President Roosevelt brought manatees into his wild-life protection program remains unclear. (Burroughs, we are told by the ornithologist Charles William Beebe, astonishingly didn’t know what a manatee was before visiting Florida in 1903.36) Perhaps as a boy Roosevelt encountered manatees or sea cows; they are part of the mermaid myth and had become popular characters in children’s books. Maybe he read one of the landmark manatee studies by Outram Bangs or Alfred Henry Garrod.37 Known for barrel-rolling and playful chases, manatees were hard to dislike. They continually grabbed and kissed each other, and lolled for hours in the warm waters of Florida, evidently with no worries or woes. They were herbivores and socialized with one another by nuzzling playfully. Children’s books of the mid-nineteenth century often portrayed the manatee fondly, much as they portrayed the friendly panda. (Fishermen, by contrast, often denounced manatees as homely and shot them on sight.) During the Great Depression they were poached for meat.
Perhaps Robert B. Roosevelt’s Florida and the Game Water-Birds had affected Roosevelt. In that book, Uncle Rob had briefly diverged from his loosely structured autobiographical narrative to talk about the manatee herds he encountered throughout Florida. He noted how tourists near Mosquito Inlet couldn’t believe that “cows feed under water,” until they saw a stubby-snouted manatee munching on and sheltering under freshwater plants. “The animals and birds are as queer and unnatural as the herbage,” R.B.R. wrote of aquatic Florida. “Or as a climate which furnishes strawberries, green peas, shad, and roses at Christmas.”38
A close relative of the manatee—Stellar’s sea cow—had been hunted into extinction in 1768, and Roosevelt worried that the same fate awaited the West Indian species. Indeed, in 1885, an observer in Florida noted that “ten years ago the meat (of a manatee) could be bought at fifty cents a pound. The animals are becoming far too scarce to admit of it being sold at all. There is no doubt that the manatee is fast becoming an extinct animal.” And another factor in the manatees’ uncertain prospect was that they reproduced slowly. Male manatees didn’t breed until they were nine years old, and females didn’t reach sexual maturity until they were five. A lone calf was then born every three to six years. Mothers insisted on nursing their babies for up to two years.
Given these facts, Roosevelt was concerned about whether manatees had a future in Florida. Even though his Mosquito Inlet Reservation was ostensibly to protect native birds on small mangrove and salt grass islets, shoals, sandbars, and sand spits in Mosquito Inlet and the mouths of the Halifax and Hillsboro Rivers, manatees, he knew, also would receive needed protection in the warden-patrolled waters, especially during calving season. Part of his reason for setting aside Mosquito Inlet (near Daytona Beach), as a federal bird reservation—by means of an executive order issued on February 24, 1908—was to protect the manatees’ northernmost range. The purpose of saving Mosquito Inlet, a primordial Darwinian laboratory, was to keep the manatees there free from human molestation; they were the most essential large mammal in the Florida ecosystem. This was the same rationale he used for declaring Three Arch Rocks a federal bird reservation—doing so had the additional benefit of saving seals. If Floridians couldn’t rally to protect manatees, then the probable fate of such lesser creatures as Suwannee bass, striped mud turtle, red-cockaded