The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [460]
The story of Audubon patrol boat No. 5 sent chills down the spines of those in the “citizen bird” movement. Two Audubon wardens—Bradley and McLeod, both approved by Roosevelt—had been murdered while on duty protecting seabirds. The week McLeod was murdered, conservationists had been lobbying the state legislature in Tallahassee to amend the Lacey Act by hiring state game wardens. Now the Audubon Society in Florida was demoralized. Misdemeanors be damned! Anybody who anchored at a bird rookery should be slapped with a felony charge! If tougher conservationist laws weren’t enacted soon, Florida would be deforested, like Palestine or Spain, and bereft of birdlife!
Many Floridians, however, simply didn’t want tax revenues used for birds.59 They’d rather let the landscape become barren than pay a single cent to preserve it. On the other hand, many newspapers proudly promoted avian protection in their editorials. “To proclaim a bird reservation without providing for its protection is a waste of words,” the St. Augustine Record pointed out. “The Audubon Society asks that citizens of Florida tax themselves by voluntary contributions to maintain wardens on these rookeries during the breeding season. If this be necessary, it is a confession of failure on the part of the State that should be resented. It is an invasion by the citizens of the domain of the State that shall be rebuked. To leave this matter in the hands of a society is to invite murder and will bring the name of Florida into disrepute.”60 And the magazine Outlook asked the key question: “Will the people of Florida sleep until it is too late?”61
Columbus McLeod didn’t die in vain. In 1910, the New York State Assembly outlawed the commercialization of feathers with the passage and signing of the Shea-White Plumage Bill. In 1911, New York State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated attempts to weaken the law, thus essentially ending the domestic market for plumes.
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A zoology book that Roosevelt read one evening in the White House was responsible for his keen interest in the gopher tortoises of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In 1907, after poring over the herpetologist Raymond Ditmars’s The Reptile Book—a beautifully written encyclopedia complete with dozens of vivid and affecting photographs—T.R. grew excited about sea turtles and tortoises of all kinds.62 “Impatient with the use of scientific language obscure in meaning to all but specialists, [Ditmars] wanted to tell about snakes in an understandable style that would awake the sympathy of the general public,” the biographer L. N. Wood remarks in Raymond L. Ditmars: His Exciting Career with Reptiles, Animals, and Insects. “It was part of his lifelong campaign to break down the widespread prejudice against reptiles.”63
Mixing science with popular writing, The Reptile Book offered pages of anatomical detail about these slow-moving, solitary tortoises who seemed to be ambassadors from a prehistoric time. To President Roosevelt, this was thrilling Darwinian material, a biological extravaganza between handsome covers. What Pinchot was to trees, Grinnell to big-game, Hornaday to bison, and Chapman, Job, or Finley to birds, Ditmars was to reptiles. Legend has it that Ditmars’s office was crammed with more jars full of pickled snakes than anywhere else in the world. When the president fastened on a naturalist or a member of the animal kingdom, he didn’t just skim; he read and devoured every biological vagary and nuance. Taking a break from world affairs to ponder reptiles, Roosevelt relished learning about the differences between a tortoise carapace and plastron; about clutches; about terrestrial predilections; and about how “rolling beetles” or tumblebugs