The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  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 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 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 Ore
gon” 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. Roosevelt congratulated Finley on Oregon’s Model Law for birds. Finley inquired about Three Arch Rocks. The conversation went back and forth like that for an entire evening. The two naturalists discussed how to preserve lower Klamath Lake as a breeding ground for native birds. The Klamath basin was a large area of land, which dwarfed Crater Lake. In Florida, Roosevelt was creating federal bird reservations of forty to 200 acres. If Klamath was declared a reservation, it would be something like 80,000 acres. Further complicating the situation was the fact that the Reclamation Service was draining the wetlands for large-scale agricultural farming. Finley told Roosevelt that his Klamath irrigation project—while obviously a well-intended offshoot of the Newlands Act—was turning wetlands into mudflats. “We move to conserve or develop one resource,” Finley complained, “while at the same time, we are destroying another.”107

  Roosevelt thought Finley had the right stuff. He was a well-spoken, accomplished young man, rather overly serious, but otherwise with no discernible flaw. He had a wonderful scientifically inclined mind, which appreciated that even maggots had an important role in nature, feeding grackles and nighthawks. Also, Finley could make even a magpie nest sound as interesting as the Taj Mahal. Like Chapman, he was doing a fine job of popularizing birding. Sunset magazine—aimed at middle-class families—had published a few of his well-written ornithological pieces. Perhaps knowing that Roosevelt had a soft spot for the American white pelican (Roosevelt had, in fact, saved both Stump Lake and Chase Lake in North Dakota largely for their benefit), and much like Pinchot and La Farge in 1900 regaling Roosevelt with stories about Mount Marcy, Finley told of rowing in puffs of wind, making treacherous landings, putting up rough campsites, setting up a blind near Rattlesnake Island, and seeing half-grown pelicans and hearing their cries. Combined with the home movies, all this was quite a pitch. What image could have appealed to Roosevelt more than Finley’s colorful remark that these pelicans looked “like a squadron of white war-ships”?108

  Bravo! Bully! Wow! Roosevelt loved the whole presentation. Perhaps he had discovered a new American original like the young Audubon. Clearly, Finley wasn’t a fringe ornithologist but a main voice. Once again T.R.’s famous exuberance was called forth by the incredible photographs of young burrowing owls perched on Bohlman’s lap and Finley hand-feeding double-crested cormorants at Tule Lake. There was nothing bland about Finley’s photos. Having already saved, for John Muir, the 14,162-foot Mount Shasta, which was prominent on the horizon in much of the Klamath basin area, Roosevelt wanted to solve the political problems associated with creating a huge federal bird reservation in the middle of his Reclamation Service project. This was seen by Auduboners as Pinchot’s public revenge. Finley, however, took the compromise with a certain grace, as though, having toiled so long to bring attention to the Klamath basin, he felt a distinct relief in having gotten Roosevelt to establish something big for birds.

  As if in a great wave of protectionism, Roosevelt rescued more than 37 million waterbirds in Oregon. On August 8, 1908, by means of an “I So Declare It” executive order he created the Klamath Lake Reservation, consisting of 81,619 acres of lakes and marshes. (This would be only the first of six national wildlife refuges set aside in the Klamath basin.*) He wanted the habitat preserved—particularly the ten- to fifteen-foot-high tule—for the pelicans and grebes. But a serious error had also been made. The entire Klamath basin should have been declared a national park, like Crater Lake or Mesa Verde, and the Reclamation Service should have been booted out of southern Oregon once and for all. However, this didn’t happen. Spurred on by the Klamath Waters Association, the raping, dredging, and draining of the wetlands ecosystem continued. At best, the reclamation project was a product of its time. Although Auduboners were (and still are) grateful that Roosevelt had helped rescue the white pelicans, cormorants, grebes, and great blue herons, his conservation policy mainly failed in the Klamath basin. It was the worst example of Roosevelt’s trying to reconcile agricultural utilitarianism and waterfowl preservation. But since then, rehabilitation efforts have succeeded.109 “I hope the marsh,” Finley wrote, “will defy civilization to the end.”110

  Also, Finley succeeded in getting 81,619 acres of the Klamath basin preserved inside the Bureau of Reclamation’s reservoir. Eventually Roosevelt created many of these “overlay” refuges in the West—seventeen were established on February 25, 1909, alone, by Executive Order 1032. Some environmental historians think that these “overlay” bird reservations within reservoirs were largely a waste of time. Finley, they claim, was hoodwinked by Pinchot and those around Pinchot.

  When in 1911 Governor Oswald West of Oregon, a Democrat, selected Finley to become the state’s first Fish and Game Commissioner, Roosevelt celebrated. It was a victory for “citizen bird.” But besides women’s suffrage and prison reform, wildlife protection was one of the issues dearest to West’s heart. With unflinching determination, he insisted on public access to Oregon’s beaches.111 “In Governor West of Oregon, I found a man more intelligently alive to the beauty of nature and of harmless wild life, more eagerly desirous to avoid the wanton and brutal defacement and destruction of wild nature, and more keenly appreciative of how much this natural beauty should mean to civilized mankind, than almost any other man I have ever met holding high political position,” Roosevelt wrote in Outlook. “He had put at the head of the commission created to express these feelings in action, a naturalist of note, Mr. Finley.”112

  Praise from a former president is always a good thing for a writer. But Finley felt especially blessed when Roosevelt commended West’s environmentalist ethos in rhapsodic terms: “He desired to preserve for all time our natural resources, the woods, the water, the soil, which a selfish and shortsighted greed seeks to exploit in such fashion as to ruin them and thereby to leave our children and our children’s children heirs only to an exhausted and impoverished inheritance; he desired also to preserve, for sheer love of their beauty and interest, the wild creatures of woodland and mountain, of marsh and lake and seacoast.”113

  In the years after Roosevelt and Finley’s ini
tial collaboration of 1903 to 1909, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to pay tribute to these conservationists. In 1964, 5,325 acres of the Willamette Valley were saved as the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge. Here was one of the best spots to see Canada geese, mallards, northern pintails, and great blue herons. A botanist could study broad-leafed pondweed, water plantain, American slough grass, and Engelmann’s spike rush in the refuge. Anybody who wants to experience the Willamette valley ecosystem before Portland’s sprawl reaches it can today wander around the white oak savanna in all its primordial splendor. And in the the refuge (which is near Corvallis, Oregon), among bottomland ash forest and native prairie, is a herd of Roosevelt elk—a truly fitting tribute to the two naturalists’ work together.

  And who had the idea for this refuge? Ding Darling. He was intent on having the Willamette Valley refuge, deep in the foothills of the coast range, named for Finley and populated with Roosevelt elk. The story of Finley and Roosevelt’s collaboration now lives on in the Oregon landscape, thanks to Darling’s foresight. As for Governor Oswald West, there is a spectacular Oregon state park—situated on the Pacific Ocean between Hug Point and Nehalem Bay—named to honor his crusade for public access to beaches and for bird sanctuaries.

  The Malheur National Refuge—spanning a forty-mile area in the southeastern corner of Oregon—celebrated its centennial on April 4, 2008, by brewing a micro beer manufactured by Rogue and called Great Egret Pale Ale.114 U.S. Fish and Wildlife had good reason to celebrate. After decades of setbacks in the Klamath, rehabilitation was succeeding. Now tens of thousands of visitors come to the northern Great Basin to watch migratory birds feed in the high desert.

  Three Arch Rocks became—even more than Crater Lake—a symbol of Oregon’s pristine beauty. The largest of the surf-pounded mounds was officially named Finley Rock and is home to the largest colony of tufted puffins in the state. Tourists come to view the puffins with binoculars from Oceanside Beach and Cape Meares on the mainland. But no trespassing is allowed at the sanctuary. And from May 1 to September 15 no boats are allowed within 500 feet of the mounds.115