The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [467]
Wisely, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited Darling in 1934 to serve on the President’s Committee for Wildlife along with Aldo Leopold and Thomas Beck. A year later he hired Darling to lead the Bureau of Biological Survey into a productive period after Merriam’s era. In this capacity, Darling struck on an interesting conservation awareness scheme. He designed (and Franklin Roosevelt approved) a “duck stamp” that generated extra income for the U.S. wildlife refuges.94 Growing ever more fervent about protecting T.R.’s achievements in wild Florida, Darling founded the National Wildlife Federation, largely keeping the “wildlife protection legacy” of T.R. alive for decades to come. Just as Theodore Roosevelt saved bison and elks on preserves, Darling led efforts to rescue Nevada’s dwindling antelope herds. And during World War II, while other cartoonists focused on the war, Darling worked around the clock to save various islands near Fort Myers from overzealous developers.95
Owing to Ding Darling’s intense lobbying, in December 1945 President Harry Truman approved a lease with the State of Florida creating the Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge, adjacent to the sites T.R. had saved in 1908. Besides birds, Darling had sought protection from the Truman administration for all estuarine habitats including sea grass beds and mud-flats. 96 Keeping field notes and making sketches, as Theodore Roosevelt would have wanted, Darling recorded dark shadowy terns whose colors were indiscernible, black skimmers clouding the sky like dimly seen bats, and reddish egrets wading in flats looking for small fish. There were no flamingos to record, however, for these magnificent Phoenicopteridans had been killed off in Florida by plumers, who later bragged about it at night in taprooms. Darling’s cartoons also highlighted his efforts to create a refuge for the “toy” deer of the Keys from marauding hunters. His efforts helped to create the National Key Deer Refuge in 1957. His life was testimony against the destructive lunacy of Floridians.
When Darling died in 1962, at eighty-six, his foundation proposed renaming Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge after him. In 1967, with the approval of President Lyndon Johnson, the J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge was officially created as part of a larger, more easily administered complex that encompassed three of Roosevelt’s refuges of 1908—Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, and Island Bay. Even though this new refuge wasn’t declared until more than sixty years after T.R.’s death, its existence can be seen as his crowning achievement for wildlife protection in Florida. Nowadays it is populated by great egrets, snowy egrets, wood storks, roseate spoonbills, great and little blue herons, white and brown pelicans, tri-color herons, yellow-crowned night herons, short- and long-billed dowitchers, lesser and greater yellowlegs, anhingas, cormorants, blue-winged teal, ospreys, and bald eagles. Today, also, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge is one of the top ten birding spots in America.97 “Ding idolized Roosevelt,” Darling’s grandson, Christopher Koss, recalled. “They both shared an interest in ecology and refused to waver when it came to protecting birds. Roosevelt inspired not just Darling but an entire generation to fight for conservation. With Roosevelt as leader there became a meeting of the young minds.”98
Theodore Roosevelt’s “wild Florida” strategy of 1908 might have failed if it hadn’t been for the support of people like McLeod, Bradley, Dutcher, Chapman, and Darling. Recognizing