The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [458]
First by one bureaucratic trick, then by another, Roosevelt accomplished his overarching goal of protecting birds’ habitats. His cleverest tactic was to preserve a group of islets under a single name (for instance, Quillayute Needles in Washington state). Florida’s fishermen and its millinery industry accused Roosevelt of grabbing land. The many islands he saved were like a rash, they believed, breaking out wherever an honest land or water bounty might be had. Take Pine Island, for example—the refuge Roosevelt created on the southwest coast of Florida (north of Sanibel Island in Pine Island Sound) in the autumn of 1908. This federal bird reservation was actually three isolated islands inhabited by thousands of brown pelicans.51
Roosevelt could have declared a number of refuges around Pine Island, but he didn’t. With the agility of a professional politician, and understanding the mental laziness of many uninvolved citizens, he was able to disarm his opponents (whose greed, he felt, was pitted against his own sense of public good). By not establishing multiple refuges, Roosevelt made the preservation seem slighter. His detractors now had to object to Pine Island as a single entity. If he had instead issued three separate executive orders, cries against such a “land grab” would surely have been heard throughout Congress instead of merely in the hamlets of Lee County, Florida. A single entity was also convenient. It took only one executive order—Number 939—to save Pine Island as a priceless marine ecosystem where wildlife could flourish. Only a decision by the Supreme Court could have reversed his order, which he issued on September 15. And Roosevelt had powerful allies in the Gulf Coast to make sure this didn’t happen.
At Island Bay the Audubon Society’s game warden was Columbus B. McLeod—short, bad-tempered, and something of a hermit. His salary of thirty-five dollars a month was paid for by the National Association of Audubon Societies’ Thayer Fund. With his motorboat regularly plying the waters of Charlotte Harbor, McLeod also served as the deputy sheriff of Desoto County (present-day Desoto, Charlotte, Hardee, Glades, and Highlands counties), applying warrants and arresting poachers.52 McLeod—Paul Kroegel’s counterpart on the Florida Gulf coast—was almost sixty, unmarried, and an outdoorsman. He was a friend of the manatees but his primary purpose in life was to protect egrets and roseate spoonbills from extraction. Florida was a bird paradise, he believed, but if the plumer gangs weren’t broken up, even the white pelicans would vanish. Warden McLeod would fearlessly motor up to bands of illegal hunters and threaten to have them busted, drowned, run down, hanged, and marched off in shackles—all at once if need be—if they didn’t leave the Roosevelt administration’s rookeries alone. Some of his rows with these hunters should probably have been covered in the Tampa Tribune, but fisticuffs were part of daily life along the Gulf shore. “I protected the Sunset Island Colony for three years in my feeble way without a cent of compensation except the love I had for the wild, free birds and the pleasure it gave me to save the lives of every single bird that I could,” McLeod wrote in the fall of 1908, in a report to the Audubon Society. “Since that time you have engaged me as a warden for the Audubon Societies, with a salary and nice little boats, which allowed me to look after their [the birds’] interests more and give them better protection.”53
McLeod received his mail on the island hamlet of Placida, but he actually lived on Cayo Pelau Island (116 acres of wetland mangrove and ten acres of uplands). With