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basin, on instructions from William Dutcher, now head of the National Association of Audubon Societies. Nowhere in North America were there so many jungles of floating tules (pronounced too-lees) as in the Klamath basin. Tules are a huge species of sedge, part of the family Cyperaceae. Little clusters of sprouting tules—a plump, rounded green stem with grass-like leaves often clustered around beige flowers—were once so common around Tulelane Lake that in the California-Oregon wetlands there was a popular expression, “out in the tules,” meaning “beyond way-away.” Along the shorelines of the California-Oregon lakes the tule marshes served as a buffer against water surges and high winds. Even the haze that beset the state borderline area, particularly along the Pacific coast, was known as tule fog. Walking on a tule was akin to hiking in snowdrifts—you never knew when you’d plunge downward. Treading carefully in the tules, Finley and Bohlman once again delivered photographic gems. Their straight-on black-and-white portrait of a canvasback in tule was as artful as an Audubon print. Some of the photographs, such as four Caspian terns screaming at each other, were comical. Others, like some tiny spotted sandpipers dancing around a spring flower, were aimed at winning children over to the Audubon Society’s cause.104

Worried that President Roosevelt—his chief ally—was consumed by the ceaseless distractions of Washington, D.C., Finley focused his activism on counterbalancing the San Francisco plume hunters who were killing off birdlife in the Klamath basin. Keeping detailed notes about the plumers he encountered, Finley recorded that the going rates per dozen birds were: teal ($3), mallard ($5), pintail ($7), and canvasback ($9). Bales of skins were being shipped out, like hay. Camping on marsh tules, which made a fine mattress, Finley started writing up his field notes as articles for The Condor magazine in 1907; these articles included “Among the Pelicans,” “The Grebes of Southern Oregon” and “Among the Gulls on Klamath Lake.”105 As Roosevelt had intuited, Finley was a naturalist writer almost as good as Muir and Burroughs. And what made Finley sui generis among wildlife photographers of the early twentieth century was that he also took motion pictures of the lower Klamath. He had footage of great migratory waterfowl swarms and close-ups of pelicans nesting. (Roosevelt liked that, too: after all, he had filmed Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy wolf-coursing in Oklahoma.) Today, Finley’s grainy black-and-white films are prized possessions in the archives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Much like Paul Kroegel at Pelican Island, Finley at the lower Klamath and Lake Tule was a master of walking softly among the birds. The western grebe rookeries he studied were like none other in the world. He would sit quietly for hours in the low reeds, camouflaged, spying as grebes dived and swam underwater with chicks on their backs. Even when the wind ruffled the surface of the tule and sheets of rain blew eastward horizontally, Finley didn’t abandon his blind. Once he got lucky and photographed western grebes hatching from eggs amid dry tules. “We watched as one of the little Western Grebes cut his way out of the shell and liberated himself,” Finley wrote in The Condor. “The wall of his prison is quite thick for a chick to penetrate, but after he gets his bill through in one place, he goes at the task like clock work and it only takes him about half an hour after he has smelled the fresh air to liberate himself. After the first hole, he turns himself a little and begins hammering in a new place and he keeps this up till he has made a complete revolution in his shell, and the end or cap of the egg, cut clear around, drops off, and the youngster soon kicks himself into the sunshine.”106

On behalf of the Oregon Audubon Society, Finley, armed with field notes, photography, and a home movie, journeyed back to Washington, D.C. in 1906 to personally show off the Oregon lake region to Roosevelt at the White House.