The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Writing years later in Nature Magazine about the federal bird reservation movement in the Pacific Northwest during the Roosevelt era, Finley offered a succinct rationale for west coast bird refuges in wetlands (not just on oceanic rocks). “A very large number of lakes and ponds have been drained and many swamps have been dried up under the guise of making agricultural land,” Finley wrote. “With the gradual spread of population, each year the migratory flocks return to former nesting sites, only to find them destroyed, and their natural food supply diminished. The vital point today in wild fowl preservation is that a goodly number of the remaining lakes, ponds, and swamps must be preserved. No matter how many game laws we have or how rigidly these are enforced birds, like people, cannot live without homes and many species are sure to be pushed to the point of final disappearance.”31

  Because Washington and Oregon weren’t overly populated (after all, they got about 140 inches of rain annually) and the extraction operations were just beginning along the Pacific Northwest coast, Roosevelt had been able to make a preemptive strike on behalf of wildlife in 1907 with Three Arch Rocks, followed by the three Washington state bird rock archipelagos and the waterfowl marshes of Oregon. On the same numerologist’s dream of a day (08/08/08) that Klamath Lake was established, so too was Key West. Florida, in 1908, proved far more difficult. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was ready to methodically finish the job he had started at Pelican Island, Passage Key, and Indian Key. Outfoxing his opponents every step of the way, confusing them with his embrace of both hunting and preservationist polarities, Roosevelt issued one executive order after another from February to October 1908 to save sites in Florida such as Mosquito Inlet, Dry Tortugas, Key West, Pine Island, Palma Sola, Matlacha Pass, and Island Bay.32

  Just as Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle spurred Roosevelt to issue laws regulating meatpacking, Wild Wings saved birdlife in Florida. Understanding that in the tropics residents sometimes resorted to slash-and-burn practices, the president moved quickly to protect “Florida’s wildlife heritage.” No salt prairie, coral reef, mangrove thicket, or bird rock was precluded from the Biological Survey’s consideration. And Roosevelt had the congressional ruling of June 28, 1906, about not disturbing or trespassing on federal bird Reservations, to work with as a legal deterrent in Florida. Not that it was foolproof—the congressional order was frequently defied. A deranged Floridian, for example, shot four of Roosevelt’s pelicans on Mosquito Inlet, claiming that the refuges were illegal. The courts ruled in favor of the Roosevelt administration.33 The assailant pleaded guilty and paid a steep fine.

  This was a time of profound, positive change in the Florida wildlife protection movement. Numerous islands along Florida’s Gulf of Mexico and every bird rookery along the Atlantic Ocean now had aesthetic value to Roosevelt. He would have to save them from the persistent ignorance of the ex-Confederate yokels and from railroad executives like Henry Flagler. In An Autobiography, Roosevelt listed his most notable wildlife protection achievements in Chapter II, “The Natural Resources of the Nation.” Among them, Florida ranked high. In particular, he saved the West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris) at Mosquito Inlet in Volusia County, about eighty miles from Orlando. Roosevelt hoped to create “safe havens” throughout Florida where these manatees could live unmolested, as President Ulysses S. Grant had done for the northern fur seals of Alaska. The manatee—whose name is Haitian, meaning “big beaver”—was almost as special to Roosevelt as the buffalo.34 Although he did not create an American Manatee Association, he did fight for the species’ survival. “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” he said with regard to protecting Florida’s manatees and seabirds, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.” 35

  Exactly when President Roosevelt brought manatees into his wild-life protection program remains unclear. (Burroughs, we are told by the ornithologist Charles William Beebe, astonishingly didn’t know what a manatee was before visiting Florida in 1903.36) Perhaps as a boy Roosevelt encountered manatees or sea cows; they are part of the mermaid myth and had become popular characters in children’s books. Maybe he read one of the landmark manatee studies by Outram Bangs or Alfred Henry Garrod.37 Known for barrel-rolling and playful chases, manatees were hard to dislike. They continually grabbed and kissed each other, and lolled for hours in the warm waters of Florida, evidently with no worries or woes. They were herbivores and socialized with one another by nuzzling playfully. Children’s books of the mid-nineteenth century often portrayed the manatee fondly, much as they portrayed the friendly panda. (Fishermen, by contrast, often denounced manatees as homely and shot them on sight.) During the Great Depression they were poached for meat.

  Perhaps Robert B. Roosevelt’s Florida and the Game Water-Birds had affected Roosevelt. In that book, Uncle Rob had briefly diverged from his loosely structured autobiographical narrative to talk about the manatee herds he encountered throughout Florida. He noted how tourists near Mosquito Inlet couldn’t believe that “cows feed under water,” until they saw a stubby-snouted manatee munching on and sheltering under freshwater plants. “The animals and birds are as queer and unnatural as the herbage,” R.B.R. wrote of aquatic Florida. “Or as a climate which furnishes strawberries, green peas, shad, and roses at Christmas.”38

  A close relative of the manatee—Stellar’s sea cow—had been hunted into extinction in 1768, and Roosevelt worried that the same fate awaited the West Indian species. Indeed, in 1885, an observer in Florida noted that “ten years ago the meat (of a manatee) could be bought at fifty cents a pound. The animals are becoming far too scarce to admit of it being sold at all. There is no doubt that the manatee is fast becoming an extinct animal.” And another factor in the manatees’ uncertain prospect was that they reproduced slowly. Male manatees didn’t breed until they were nine years old, and females didn’t reach sexual maturity until they were five. A lone calf was then born every three to six years. Mothers insisted on nursing their babies for up to two years.

  Given these facts, Roosevelt was concerned about whether manatees had a future in Florida. Even though his Mosquito Inlet Reservation was ostensibly to protect native birds on small mangrove and salt grass islets, shoals, sandbars, and sand spits in Mosquito Inlet and the mouths of the Halifax and Hillsboro Rivers, manatees, he knew, also would receive needed protection in the warden-patrolled waters, especially during calving season. Part of his reason for setting aside Mosquito Inlet (near Daytona Beach), as a federal bird reservation—by means of an executive order issued on February 24, 1908—was to protect the manatees’ northernmost range. The purpose of saving Mosquito Inlet, a primordial Darwinian laboratory, was to keep the manatees there free from human molestation; they were the most essential large mammal in the Florida ecosystem. This was the same rationale he used for declaring Three Arch Rocks a federal bird reservation—doing so had the additional benefit of saving seals. If Floridians couldn’t rally to protect manatees, then the probable fate of such lesser creatures as Suwannee bass, striped mud turtle, red-cockaded woodpecker, and southeastern beach mice was dismal indeed. Also, selfishly, Roosevelt wanted manatees saved so that he could enjoy them when he went spearfishing after his tenure at the White House was over.39

  Sea turtles played a significant role in another of Roosevelt’s federal bird reservations. The president liked the fact that sea turtles came from “a different world.” Long before the biologist Marston Bates published The Forest and the Sea in 1960, Roosevelt understood that the “sea margin”—where marine and terrestrial environments mixed—meant everywhere in Florida. Whether it was on tidal flats, sandy beaches, or flyspeck islets, marine species often used land and sea interchangeably.40 Certainly this was true of sea turtles. The Atlantic coast of Florida, especially from Melbourne Beach to Palm Beach was the world’s most crucial habitat for sea turtles—loggerheads, greens, and leatherbacks.41 Keeping up on sea turtle biology Roosevelt wanted to pro
tect egg clutches from predators ranging in menace from raccoons to Miami restaurateurs. Roosevelt didn’t mind if fishermen caught these turtles to eat (he personally thought turtle fritters were dee-licious) but ravaging their breeding grounds indiscriminately needed correction.

  On April 6, 1908, Roosevelt declared the Tortugas Keys (now Dry Tortugas National Park) a federal bird reservation. (The Tortugas group, located ninety miles west of Key West, Florida, and 470 miles southeast of New Orleans, consisted of eight little islands: Loggerhead Key, Bird Key, Garden Key, Long Key, Bush Key, Sand Key, Middle Key, and East Key.) Roosevelt boldly protected both sea turtles’ egg-laying and the boobies that congregated by the thousands in the buttonwood trees. When the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon first visited these coral reefs in 1513, he marveled at the colonies of sea turtles he encountered. His crew recorded catching 160 of them. Ponce de Leon considered them a good omen, and they were also perfect for soup and stew; he was the one who named the remote island group Tortugas (“turtles”). John James Audubon had spent days in Tortugas Key mainly to observe the sooty terns that annually nested here, raised chicks, and then migrated back to the Yucatán peninsula.42 In Caribbean pirate lore, the chain had a bad reputation as a site of shipwrecks; Caribbean captains, in fact, called the reefs an “underwater graveyard.”43 Before long, the word “Dry” was added to nautical charts to warn mariners that there was no fresh water on the island chain.

  Although one can’t be certain, Roosevelt probably first seriously encountered the Dry Tortugas when writing his two-volume history The Naval War of 1812, published in 1882. Fort Jefferson—America’s largest coastal fort in the mid-1800s, built with more than 16 million bricks—was constructed on Garden Key in that chain (following the battle of New Orleans) to provide a future defense line for Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. At times the Dry Tortugas were used to quarantine people with yellow fever. After being convicted as a co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Dr. Samuel Mudd was incarcerated at this remote prison fortress in the Gulf of Mexico, helping to care for these patients. By the time Roosevelt became president in 1901, lighthouses were operating in Tortugas Key warning sloops and schooners of the low-lying staghorn coral, patch reefs, sand flats, and sea grass beds. In Florida and the Game Water-Birds, Uncle Rob had declared the Tortugas Keys the center of the greatest fish population in the entire United States. He was indubitably right. Although the Tortugas were difficult to get to, sports fishermen, including the novelist Zane Grey, used to hunt in the warm waters for 300-pound blue marlins and 100-pound wahoos.

  The biologist Rachel Carson of the U.S. Fish and Service Wildlife wrote in The Edge of the Sea about the fascinating creatures Roosevelt had saved with his federal bird reservations—particularly the Tortugas group. Describing how loggerhead, green, and hawksbill turtles must return to land every year for spawning, Carson noted the majestic seasonal ceremony in the Tortugas group when the turtles “emerge from the ocean and lumber over the sand like prehistoric beasts to dig their nests and bury their eggs.”44 Roosevelt was dead when Carson published The Sea Around Us in 1951, but his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth wrote a fan letter to Carson, saying that her father would have welcomed this noble literary work with open arms.45

  The Dry Tortugas were so remote in 1908 that most ornithologists in New York hadn’t even visited them. Invariably, visitors to Key West erroneously believed they were at the end of America, not realizing that the Dry Tortugas were seventy miles farther out. The best-informed ornithological studies that had seized Roosevelt’s attention were a research paper by Dr. John B. Watson of John Hopkins University (it had been funded by the Carnegie Institution, and brevity was its virtue) and, of course, Job’s Wild Wings (which included photographs of sooty tern swarms estimated at 6,000 or 8,000 strong).46 Complementing Watson and Job was the Florida Audubon Society, which undertook a bird count on the island chain. The yearly return of the sooty and noddy terns was being touted by some ornithologists as the east coast’s equivalent of the swallows returning to Capistrano mission in southern California. “In other words,” the ornithologist Alexander Sprunt, Jr., would write in The Auk about the Dry Tortugas, “if not held as a miracle, at least the conviction is extant that the birds arrive and depart on exactly the same day each year and, if it varies at all, it is held to be due to certain phases of the moon!”47

  Four months after the preservation of the Tortugas group, Roosevelt set his sights on the unpopulated islands of the Key West chain. Developers were eyeing the island chain and hoping to build tourist hotels, so Roosevelt refused to delay. Key West might not seem much different from the other Florida mangrove islands he had established as federal bird reservations, yet it was unique. For one thing, it was a turtle nesting area free of raccoons. This meant that the offshore beaches and sand dunes were an ideal nesting habitat for loggerhead and green turtles (unlike Breton Island in Louisiana, which did have raccoons). Every spring, hard-shelled marine turtles would leave the ocean to bury their round eggs in the coarse-grained sand dunes at Key West. Because there were no raccoons or other egg thieves, the successful hatching rate on Woman Key and Boca Grande Key (both part of T.R.’s Key West Federal Bird Reservation) was extraordinarily high. The turtles’ real enemy was fishing nets, and tough laws would have to be enacted to prevent the demise of greens and loggerheads. Later, as a former president, Roosevelt inspected sea turtle eggs in Breton Island; he foolishly dug some up to eat—a sin in the eyes of modern marine biologists. For all his acumen as a naturalist, Roosevelt—like most of his generation—simply didn’t know how endangered they were. It would be another forty years before the plight of sea turtles was discovered and eloquently articulated by Dr. Archie Carr.

  Even though the Key West and Dry Tortugas Reservations only protected small islands and keys, their protection helped keep the surrounding waters clean and clear. Crater Lake blue, with shades of emerald and dabs of purple, these exquisite waters seemed to roll into infinity. Colonies of soft coral were a pale plum color, and little starfish with tube feet clung to the sides. When Key West islets were saved by Roosevelt by means of an executive order (August 8, 1908), these unparalleled coral reefs were already celebrated among oceanographers all over the world. Most scientists agreed that only the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, which was ten times larger than Key West, was more magnificent. To Roosevelt, Florida’s coral reefs—made of living colonies of tube-like animals called polyps—were a world unto themselves. The more than 6,000 shallow coral reefs—from Key Biscayne to Key West to the Dry Tortugas—were breathtaking in their biodiversity. Anybody who has owned tropical fish knows how amazing the Day-Glo colors of the bicolor damselfish, neon goby, clownfish, and foureye butterflyfish can be when viewed in an aquarium tank. Many first-timers in Key West, however, come to experience such wondrous and underwater wildlife in its natural setting. The diver in Key West quickly realizes that an ever-soothing, symbiotic world without human footprints exists in the coral reefs, that the harmonious balance of the ecosystem is awe-inspiring.

  If Roosevelt had traveled (as modern visitors do) in a glass-bottom boat a mile off of Key West—over a vast tract of ominous shoals—a coral kingdom would suddenly have appeared before his eyes. As Herbert K. Job understood, this was an important zone for obtaining data on schools of luminous tetra. On closer inspection, Roosevelt would have seen a brown film, or membrane, which blanketed the entire ecosystem together as if a connecting tunic. Polyps with flower-bud mouths, towering barrel sponges, giant octopuses, jellyfish waving their tentacles, porcupine fish ballooning themselves up, angelfish with broad bands of shiny black sailing into and out of coral thickets, all lived in this Key West reef. Their lives were fragile. Roosevelt’s nature writings are nearly encyclopedic, but he never wrote about this ecosystem. He surely knew the difference between a lumpfish and a surgeonfish but when it came to differentiating coral species, he was probably clueless. What he did know, however, was that these Florida reefs need
ed protection, that scientists had still not discovered all the species and plants living on the vegetation-rich bottom of the ocean. The Florida Keys, as Wild Wings indicated, was an heirloom as valuable as Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon.

  Roosevelt, moreover, considered these reefs national treasures not just because shimmering fish, rays, jellyfish, anemones, big sponges, lobsters, and bull sharks were scientifically fascinating. Roosevelt probably also understood the reefs protected American coasts by reducing “wave energy” from hurricanes and tropical storms. And Key West was the habitat of more than 250 bird species. The national imperative was, therefore, clear. To disregard scientific opinion, aesthetic value, and natural security in favor of fast dollars was, to his mind, reprehensible. When the Key West reservation celebrated its centennial in 2008, only about half of Florida’s coral reefs had even been mapped.48 This didn’t, however, mean that the reefs were secure from environmental degradation. A coalition of marine scientists feared that rising carbon emissions might kill off the reefs by 2050 or 2060. “Burning coal, oil and gas adds carbon dioxide—a heat-absorbing greenhouse gas—to the atmosphere,” Elizabeth Weise wrote in USA Today. “That interferes with the ability of coral, living organisms, to calcify their skeletons, and the coral begins to die.”49

  IV

  Each Florida wildlife refuge Roosevelt saved in 1908 had a fascinating story of its own. The last remaining rookeries along the lower Gulf Coast of Florida were documented by the National Association of Audubon Societies Secretary T. Gilbert Pearson in April of 1906, during a trip he made to visit two Tampa Bay bird reservations already established by Roosevelt—Indian Key and Passage Key—and to help the widow of murdered warden Guy Bradley buy a home in Key West. Pearson found a colony of brown pelicans and cormorants at Palma Sola, eight miles south of Tampa Bay and two large colonies of brown pelicans a few miles north of the Caloosahatchee River, presumably in Matlacha Pass, and Pine Island Sound. He also discovered two large colonies of Louisiana (tricolored) herons in Gasparilla Sound (Island Bay). He learned that the bird laws of Florida were hardly enforced. Only Guy Bradley kept the professional hunters at bay before his murder. Pelican colonies were constantly raided by locals for the eggs. Plume hunting caused the egrets to be so scarce that Pearson only saw a dozen in six weeks of observations. A local bird-skin collector was caught in 1904 selling many different kinds of birds including the now-extinct Carolina parakeet and the extirpated (and possibly extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker. Pearson’s reports made their way to Roosevelt’s desk and found an attentive audience in the President. The message was clear, these Gulf Coast Florida colonies (Palma Sola, Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, and Island Bay) also needed protection.50