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By Root 4299 0

that for victory in Florida, pro-wild life troops were necessary, Roosevelt had recruited them. When he approved the appointment of wardens in the tradition of Kroegel and Bradley, he felt the same unswerving conviction he once exhibited as a Rough Rider in Cuba. Prototypes of future on-site employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, these biologically informed wardens enlisted eagerly in Roosevelt’s cause. Roosevelt encouraged his disciples on how to win through a combination of public education, grassroots work, alliance-building, and scathing ridicule. The key factor was bringing poachers and plumers to account. Some of these Rooseveltians later became Bull Moosers, paying T.R. homage well into the 1940s, when World War II caused the progressive movement to taper off.

What’s most impressive about Roosevelt’s bird reservations is how coordinated the system became. Signing executive orders on behalf of birds became a habit for Roosevelt during his last eighteen months in office. The Biological Survey’s sanctuaries were like latticework, linked by regional offices. What Roosevelt asked Floridians to do between 1901 and 1909 was think about the future. The industrial growth of Jacksonville, Tampa, and Miami was a good thing. The Reclamation Service might consider draining the Everglades and building canals throughout south Florida. People had to live and improve. Yet, Floridians also needed to develop “the right kind of a civilization.”99

Typically, Roosevelt envisioned Florida’s big cities surrounded by big greenbelts. He knew that Florida was a fragile, hurricane-lashed eco-system and that it needed perennial care. Florida couldn’t be stripped of its greenness. Manatees, roseate spoonbills, greens and leatherbacks, marlins, sooties, and mangrove forests—all were a heritage to be passed down to future generations. Did Floridians not want their children to see colonies of interesting waterbirds? And coral-beds? Outsiders would always try to swoop into Florida and extract natural resources for profit, leaving behind environmental degradation. Shouldn’t real Floridians protect their state’s biological bounty of tropical forests, pristine beaches, and coral reefs from corporate molestation?

VIII

The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry once wrote, “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” 100 Berry might almost have been communicating with William L. Finley’s spirit. For Finley, as Oregon’s pioneering wildlife photographer, waded in scum ponds and slept soaking wet in ocean-rock crevices in order to document the habits of migratory birds. His stolid ornithological concentration had already become legendary in rural Oregon. The establishment of Three Arch Rocks on October 14, 1907, inspired Finley to preserve yet another waterfowl concentration site in Oregon: the Klamath basin, a series of lakes and marshes that were a stopover for approximately three-quarters of the Pacific Flyway waterfowl.101 These extensive wetlands attracted more than 6 million waterfowl, including the American white pelican, the double-crested cormorant, and numerous heron species (including the kind that brought Wendell Berry such comfort).102 Roosevelt didn’t write an introduction to Finley’s first book, American Birds, as he had done for Herbert Job’s Wild Wings, but he nevertheless marveled at Finley’s ornithological accuracy.103 The two simultaneous events—Three Arch Rocks becoming a federal reserve and American Birds being published—were not accidental.

Nobody did more to save the birds of Oregon and Washington than William L. Finley, pictured here patting a cormorant. Finley, a brilliant wildlife photographer, led the West Coast Audubon Society movement.

William L. Finley. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

In 1905 Finley and Bohlman—fresh from studying golden eagles in California—started spending a lot of time in the lower Klamath