In early 1939, R. K. Wickstrum, the president of the Arizona Game Protective Association, sent the president loads of information on Arizona’s dwindling bighorn sheep population. He followed up with a telegraphed plea. “I have received your telegram of January 8, urging the establishment of the Kofa and Cabeza Game Ranges,” Roosevelt replied. “The administration of these areas have been given careful consideration and I believe the Executive Order, which I have just signed, will solve the problem. This order sets up a limited game range within the grazing district and protects the interests of prospectors as well as those of the stockmen, while at the same time taking care of the matter of the preservation of the Big Horn sheep.”12
On January 25, 1939, Roosevelt established both the Kofa Game Range (around 660,000 acres) and Cabeza Prieta Game Range (around 860,000 acres) to be jointly managed by the Grazing Service (now the Bureau of Land Management) and the Biological Survey.13
The Biological Survey saw Kofa and Cabeza Prieta as field laboratories where it could conduct research about ways to combat bot fly larvae, menaces that caused chronic (and often fatal) sinusitis in Arizona’s desert bighorn sheep. This sinusitis had seriously reduced the domestic sheep population in Arizona. Over the years, studies suggested the best way to fight disease was through an extremely healthy habitat, and so the creation of the refuge rescued the species in more than one way. Owing to the administration’s foresight, the wild sheep population of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert would double in size within three years. And federal protection arrived in the nick of time: True magazine had recently published a pro-hunting article extolling the virtues of achieving a “grand slam of rams” (i.e., shooting one of each of the four varities of North American sheep).14 If not for Roosevelt’s and Ickes’s actions in Nevada and Arizona, it’s unclear whether the desert bighorns would have survived in the American West. Nevertheless, the language in FDR’s executive orders about limited ranching and grazing worried Ickes: these were loopholes, approved by Wallace, that Ickes thought should be monitored by Interior.
Setting aside the remote 860,000 acres of the Cabeza Prietas brought other unexpected benefits for wildlife—such as the protection of the endangered Sonoran antelope (Antilocapra americana sonoriensis), a subspecies of pronghorn. If the pronghorn is the fastest land mammal indigenous to North America, then the Sonoran is the fastest pronghorn, capable of sprinting at sixty miles per hour.15 Now, it was in a precarious state, thanks to overhunting, habitat fragmentation, loss of foraging acreage, and periods of extreme drought. If Roosevelt hadn’t created the Cabeza Prieta refuge, it’s very likely that the Sonoran antelope would have gone extinct. (As it stands, there are fewer than two hundred left in the United States, with slightly more in Mexico.)
At the dedication of the Kofa Game Refuge on April 2, 1939, Major Burnham spoke movingly about the vanishing southwestern frontier he called the depoblado (the unpopulated wilderness). Creating the Kofa and Cabeza Prieta game ranges not only saved bighorn sheep, but also furnished protected habitat for peccaries, mule deer, and other desert-dwelling species. And Burnham urged FDR to authorize similar reserves in New Mexico. (In 1941, FDR indeed established yet another desert bighorn preserve in New Mexico—the San Andres.) To further bolster the bighorn’s chances of survival in the Southwest, Ickes tasked fifty Native Americans who were working for the Indian CCC on Four Peaks Dam with securing its water supply. They were assisted by some descendants of the Rough Riders: grandsons of men who fought with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill in 1898 in Cuba were part of FDR’s legendary tree army in Arizona. “They did their work well,” Fish and Wildlife News declared in the late 1970s, “for the impoundment has not been known to go dry since and the structure is as solid as the day it was finished.”16
The utilities, railroad interests, cattlemen, and mining companies were not pleased with Roosevelt’s passion for “desert wild.” Ickes was blamed for the New Deal’s sudden focus on protecting desertscapes. An angry Henry Wallace, in fact, tried to maneuver around Interior in order to allow domestic sheep to graze in the Arizona game ranges. When Ickes caught wind of Wallace’s plan, he was furious. There was no way that domestic sheep and desert bighorns could properly graze on the same acreage without any incidents of crossbreeding and the spread of disease.17
II
In the spring of 1939, Roosevelt dispatched Henry Wallace to dedicate a 2,670-acre tract of southern Maryland woodlands and cultivated fields as the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Its mission was to “develop the scientific information needed to provide the biological foundation for conserving and managing the Nation’s biological resources most effectively.”18 The Washington Star described Patuxent as “the world’s first national wildlife experiment station”; there had been others, but none with nearly the scope and the impact of the New Deal facility.19 Patuxent’s biologists would study flora and fauna, migratory bird routes, mass agriculture, predator-prey relationships, nutritional requirements for various species, the effects of fertilizers and pollutants on mammalian reproduction cycles, and how diseases affected animal health. Visitors were asked—in this regard, Patuxent was ahead of its time—to consider global environmental issues and how they affected the wildlife found in their own backyards.
Situated within the watershed of the Patuxent and Little Patuxent rivers, the center, which today sits on a 12,841-acre tract of land and is the largest science and environmental education center in the Department of the Interior, would reinvent the studies of wildlife biology and ecology. Roosevelt wanted bird populations observed to gauge the health of varied ecosystems—and not only for biological reasons. Birds were sensitive even to changes in climate: this meant they were species that could indicate trends. Such genera as plovers, sandpipers, ducks, hawks, and warblers were banded and tracked at Patuxent. The woodsy Maryland compound looked like a handsome Rural Demonstration Area. Located midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Patuxent was a hodgepodge of depleted farmlands under crop cultivation; upland woods that included mixed stands of pitch and Virginia pine; deciduous trees (predominantly oak); a vast array of shrubs; native-plant landscaping; and marsh-swamp lowlands fed by numerous creeks.20 There were two remarkable trees at Patuxent: an overcup oak with a circumference of fifteen feet five inches, and a river birch with a circumference of eleven feet five inches, believed to be among the largest living specimens of their kind.21
Research operations at Patuxent were centered on Snowden Hall, a house built around 1815 and enlarged by the WPA and PWA to provide lodging and a cafeteria. Also erected on the refuge were laboratory buildings, a sawmill, a carpentry garage, a machine shed, large barns, incubator facilities, and employees’ apartments.22 More than two hundred CCC workmen razed forty buildings with bulldozers and then engineered twenty-four, measuring twenty by fifty feet, for one of the center’s first extensive studies, focusing on aquatic flora. Early that June, when Wallace arrived for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, a two-month-old red fox (Vulpes vulpes) was thrust into his arms. Always the obliging politician, Wallace scratched the kit behind its ears. The assembled photographers happily clicked away.23
During the Hoover years, the Biological Survey had worked to exterminate the fox—a predator of chickens—by using poison; now, however, in a crucial turnaround, these canids were being hand-raised in carefully monitored conditions. A new “predator conservation” philosophy was developing at Patuxent. “The projected program for this national wildlife experiment station is intended to benefit wildlife in general,” Wallace explained at the dedication, “to find out under what conditions wildlife may be produced or wastelands retired from agriculture and to determine the inter-relationship of agriculture and forestry practices on wildlife.”24
Operating on a shoestring, the research center focused on helping to rehabilitate species in danger of going extinct. Phrases such as “as extinct as the dodo” or “gone the way of the passenger pigeon” were common among biologists at the facility, thanks to Hornad
ay’s Our Vanishing Wildlife. These government scientists were saddened by the long list of species that had already gone extinct. That list included a dark species of bison (Bison bison) that had roamed the American East up to the early nineteenth century; the Maine giant mink (Neovison macrodon), twice as large as other mink species, which went extinct in 1860; and the California grizzlies in the Sierras, which had died out in the 1920s.25
The Patuxent experiments implemented in Maryland would simultaneously be applied on a grand scale in North Dakota, especially at the Sullys Hill National Game Reserve and Des Lacs Migratory Waterfowl Refuge. No longer was the USDA merely studying the impact wildlife had on human communities; the government would examine how human activity influenced struggling wildlife populations. Roosevelt entrusted Dr. Ira Gabrielson, chief of the Biological Survey, with the administration of the compound. Gabrielson, in turn, chose Dr. L. C. Morley, a respected veterinarian, to serve as the superintendent of the refuge. Although Gabrielson had a friendly personality, no one doubted his professional commitment to ecology. In the coming years, sitting at a desk in Washington, surrounded by mounds of documents, Gabrielson would write numerous books, including Wildlife Conservation (1941), Wildlife Refuges (1943), and Wildlife Management (1951).26
Dr. Gabrielson had personally selected the Patuxent site for the research center because of its proximity to Washington and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, with which the campus shared a western boundary. The retired tobaccolands were ideal for experimental farming. Due to the healthy grasses and ponds at Patuxent, one never knew when an interesting bird—a “feathered jewel”—might drop down from the sky.27 Numerous Biological Survey labs would be relocated from the District of Columbia to Maryland, nearer to the research center (eventually, only the administrative operations of the Biological Survey would remain in Washington). Clarence Cottam, head of the Division of Food Habits, eventually developed lab space in which he could analyze the stomachs of quail and the gizzards of crows.28 Wild birds from Patuxent such as tree swallows and brown thrashers were fed a variety of seeds in an attempt to find the optimal one. Before long Cottam and his staff discovered that waterfowl died from lead poisoning after ingesting fishing tackle made from lead, proving that lead was toxic to most creatures. (It wouldn’t be until 1977 that the U.S. government would ban lead-based paint.) Dr. Cottam and his research were important to Rachel Carson early in her career.
Suspicion about the Patuxent compound abounded in agricultural circles. Unconfirmed reports in Modern Game Breeding magazine charged that the research center was a sly cover for duck and geese factories that would undercut poultry farmers already in the breeding business.29 Many hunters viewed the facility as a way to use science to impose further regulations on their activities.30 The misgivings of animal rights activists focused on vivisection, including experiments that involved infecting animals with viruses to study the effects. (A reporter found this complaint to have some merit, writing, “Ferret with sniffles put in with normal ferret on 4/25/39 to induct infection by contact.”)31 Many hunters and trappers were convinced that the Biological Survey was getting into the lucrative fur business (because of the photo of that fox cradled in Henry Wallace’s arms) and that it would soon be reducing their profits. Manufacturers regarded Patuxent as a backdoor route to factory regulation through public health scares over fertilizers and chemicals. “Pollution does vitally affect birds and animals,” Gabrielson said in response to such complaints, “as well as fish and other interests.” One of the “other interests” was the human race.32
What Roosevelt was popularizing was the belief that wildlife mattered greatly, that animals were priceless natural resources. All animal species native to Maryland—the wild turkey, cottontail, raccoon, squirrel, and woodcock—were studied at Patuxent. A seven-foot-high fence, extending for thirty miles, was erected by the CCC to protect the wild animals from stray dogs, feral cats, and poachers. Rehabilitation of white-tailed deer was an early priority at Patuxent. By the late 1930s, the species was scarce and seemed to be headed for extinction. Entire herds in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia were captured, placed in tall boxes, and carefully trucked to Patuxent for ear-tagging and biological study. The scientists at Patuxent also tried to find ways to help the Pacific black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus), whose numbers were down to around a thousand; and the tiny Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) of Florida.33
The New York Times mistakenly called the compound an “animal Eden.”34 Perhaps it was a haven for those animals that could roam freely, but for most of Patuxent’s critters, the compound was more like Alcatraz or San Quentin. Caged ferrets, quail, and buzzards rattled their doors, trying to escape. (The animals, of course, had no way of knowing that their individual losses of freedom would help their respective species survive in the long run.) A comical story in the Washington Evening Star recounted an episode in which wild turkeys, skunks, raccoons, muskrats, and foxes were released at Patuxent overnight. On waking, one CCC recruit became obsessed with capturing a wily baby fox, but the kit hissed viciously, causing him to flee in terror.
A 475-foot dam was built along Cash Creek at Patuxent to attract waterfowl to the pond grasses. The CCC also constructed rustic bridges across draws and creeks, giving the grounds a distinctly downcountry feel.35 As the center added staff, its activities expanded in myriad directions. Twin farms were established: one was operated according to wildlife practices recommended by the Soil Conservation Service; the other relied on commonly accepted methods of living among wild animals. The National Herbarium, founded in 1848, collaborated with Patuxent on aquatic-plant research.36 Thrash seed was shipped from Maryland to Oregon, Washington, and California.37
The president’s persistent call for rehabilitation of the beaver on a federal level was also prioritized at Patuxent. Thanks to excessive trapping by reckless fur traders, the beaver was scarce in the mid-Atlantic region. FDR, who hoped Castor canadensis would make a comeback nationally, believed that beavers often dramatically altered landscapes for the better. Long ago, before contracting polio, he had learned firsthand in upstate New York that a beaver colony could gnaw more than a ton of trees annually and raise the water table. By damming streams, beavers expanded wetlands, offering rich habitat for other species to prosper. Beaver ponds also controlled runoff and reduced erosion, the most dreaded word in FDR’s lexicon.38 At Patuxent, trapped beavers were now given expensive radio tracking collars and released back into the wild.39
Four other threatened North American species that attracted Roosevelt’s specific attention were the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinators), whooping crane (Grus americana), and California condor (Gymnogyps californianus). Not that FDR was regularly telephoning the center’s biologists for updates, but the USDA employees knew the White House cared deeply about these imperiled animals. New techniques such as bird banding, induced birth, public education campaigns, and no-hunt provisions were tested at Patuxent to determine their usefulness in helping these birds prosper once more.
Recognizing that saving endangered species was an interagency undertaking, Roosevelt asked the Patuxent biologists to work with entities on all levels, including the aforementioned Soil Conservation Service, state conservation commissions, 4-H Clubs, state and national parks, chapters of the Future Farmers of America, Audubon societies, sportsmen’s groups, and so on. The results of such consultation with Patuxent were varied. Wooden feeding troughs were constructed at the National Bison Range in Montana to help buffalo prosper. In Nevada, pronghorn antelope were herded into traps and shipped by truck, train, and plane to new wildlife ranges. Elk were captured in traps built around haystacks where they foraged for food in the winter. Sometimes government planes dropped blocks of salt into alpine ranges so sheep and elk could thrive. Many new approaches to wildlife survival, untested before 1939, were tried at Patuxent. A hospital for sick ducks was built within the center’s disease-control laboratory to end t
he scourge of botulism (type C), which killed thousands of waterfowl annually; it was determined that the specific strain of botulism was spread by ducks eating decayed food.40
Meanwhile, despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence, the federal government lagged behind academia and even industry in the employment of female biologists. The Bureau of Fisheries had hired Rachel Carson on a part-time basis in 1935. The following year, she wrote a series of highly readable booklets for the bureau, including “Food from the Sea.” Carson’s primary job was to analyze biological and statistical data about fish populations. Though she never worked at Patuxent, she did work closely with her fellow scientists there. She also wrote research abstracts for publication in The Progressive Fish-Culturist, a periodical for ichthyologists and fish hatchery workers.41 Able to make complex concepts in marine biology comprehensible to the general public, she was asked to write radio scripts about sea creatures. A number of Carson’s nature essays were published by the Baltimore Sun and the Atlantic Monthly. In 1939 Elmer Higgins, head of the Bureau of Fisheries, promoted her to the post of assistant aquatic biologist. When the Bureau of Fisheries and the Biological Survey were combined to form the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940, she became the public relations voice on all issues pertaining to national wildlife refuges, marshlands, and the sea.42
Unusually for a biologist, Carson avoided getting bogged down in arcane scientific data. There was a controlled fluidity in her prose; she conveyed scientific concepts to laymen with grace and ease. In the coming years Carson would write a trilogy of marine conservation classics: Under the Sea-Wind (1941); The Sea Around Us (1951); and The Edge of the Sea (1955).43 And in 1962, her manifesto Silent Spring, a brilliantly reasoned critique of the use of DDT, launched the modern environmental movement.44
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