The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [456]
The Dry Tortugas were so remote in 1908 that most ornithologists in New York hadn’t even visited them. Invariably, visitors to Key West erroneously believed they were at the end of America, not realizing that the Dry Tortugas were seventy miles farther out. The best-informed ornithological studies that had seized Roosevelt’s attention were a research paper by Dr. John B. Watson of John Hopkins University (it had been funded by the Carnegie Institution, and brevity was its virtue) and, of course, Job’s Wild Wings (which included photographs of sooty tern swarms estimated at 6,000 or 8,000 strong).46 Complementing Watson and Job was the Florida Audubon Society, which undertook a bird count on the island chain. The yearly return of the sooty and noddy terns was being touted by some ornithologists as the east coast’s equivalent of the swallows returning to Capistrano mission in southern California. “In other words,” the ornithologist Alexander Sprunt, Jr., would write in The Auk about the Dry Tortugas, “if not held as a miracle, at least the conviction is extant that the birds arrive and depart on exactly the same day each year and, if it varies at all, it is held to be due to certain phases of the moon!”47
Four months after the preservation of the Tortugas group, Roosevelt set his sights on the unpopulated islands of the Key West chain. Developers were eyeing the island chain and hoping to build tourist hotels, so Roosevelt refused to delay. Key West might not seem much different from the other Florida mangrove islands he had established as federal bird reservations, yet it was unique. For one thing, it was a turtle nesting area free of raccoons. This meant that the offshore beaches and sand dunes were an ideal nesting habitat for loggerhead and green turtles (unlike Breton Island in Louisiana, which did have raccoons). Every spring, hard-shelled marine turtles would leave the ocean to bury their round eggs in the coarse-grained sand dunes at Key West. Because there were no raccoons or other egg thieves, the successful hatching rate on Woman Key and Boca Grande Key (both part of T.R.’s Key West Federal Bird Reservation) was extraordinarily high. The turtles’ real enemy was fishing nets, and tough laws would have to be enacted to prevent the demise of greens and loggerheads. Later, as a former president, Roosevelt inspected sea turtle eggs in Breton Island; he foolishly dug some up to eat—a sin in the eyes of modern marine biologists. For all his acumen as a naturalist, Roosevelt—like most of his generation—simply didn’t know how endangered they were. It would be another forty years before the plight of sea turtles was discovered and eloquently articulated by Dr. Archie Carr.
Even though the Key West and Dry Tortugas Reservations only protected small islands and keys, their protection helped keep the surrounding waters clean and clear. Crater Lake blue, with shades of emerald and dabs of purple, these exquisite waters seemed to roll into infinity. Colonies of soft coral were a pale plum color, and little starfish with tube feet clung to the sides. When Key West islets were saved by Roosevelt by means of an executive order (August 8, 1908), these unparalleled coral reefs were already celebrated among oceanographers all over the world. Most scientists agreed that only the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, which was ten times larger than Key West, was more magnificent. To Roosevelt, Florida’s coral reefs—made of living colonies of tube-like animals called polyps—were a world unto themselves. The more than 6,000 shallow coral reefs—from Key Biscayne to Key West to the Dry Tortugas—were