To get into physical shape for Africa, Roosevelt would ride horseback every day to the point of exhaustion. “The last fifteen miles were done in pitch darkness and with a blizzard of sleet blowing in our faces,” the president wrote his son Kermit. “But we got thru safely, altho we are a little stiff and tired nobody is laid up.”8 And he raced his favorite horse over fifty miles a day that January, as if preparing to charge up San Juan Hill. He would need to make the American scientific societies and explorers’ clubs proud when he was abroad. Friends from the Cosmos Club were concerned that by trying to get into trim, Roosevelt would suffer a heart attack or stroke. Jokes circulated on Capitol Hill that “crazy Teddy” was going to die from the strenuous life, now that he was a fat ex-president loaded down with guns. Some people scoffed that with his White House tenure winding down, he was little more than a rusted bolt, hard to shake loose.
With no congressional legislation pending, Roosevelt, as interregnum presidents are likely to be, was written off as a lame duck that winter. Big business, in particular, anticipating revenge, couldn’t wait for Roosevelt’s passport to be stamped in some godforsaken African port. “Congress of course feels that I will never again have to be reckoned with,” Roosevelt noted, “and that it’s safe to be ugly with me.”9 In focusing so much on his forthcoming African safari, congressional Democrats, in particular, hoped Roosevelt’s radical conservationist crusade would peter out. However, regardless of what dark thoughts Taft harbored about Gifford Pinchot personally, he nevertheless had to embrace Roosevelt’s conservation on the campaign trail in 1908. To challenge Roosevelt on forestry would have been a death knell to Taft’s candidacy. “If I am elected President,” Taft said in Sandusky, Ohio, “I propose to devote all the ability that is in me to the constructive work of suggesting to Congress the means by which Roosevelt policies shall be clinched.”10
After enduring T.R. in the White House for seven and a half years, the legislators should have known that he would be setting traps in early 1909. “I have a very strong feeling that it is a President’s duty to get on with Congress if he possibly can, and that it is a reflection upon him if he and Congress come to a complete break,” the president wrote to Ted, Jr. “This session, however, they felt it was safe utterly to disregard me because I was going out and my successor had been elected; and I made up my mind that it was just a case, where the exception to the rule applied and that if I did not fight, and fight hard, I should be put in a contemptible position. While inasmuch as I was going out on the 4th of March I did not have to pay heed to our ability to cooperate in the fortune. The result has, I think, justified my wisdom. I have come out ahead so far, and I have been full President right up to the end—which hardly any other President ever has been.”11
So, while wags laughed about Roosevelt’s African trip, the president acted. Congressmen had been asleep in 1903 when Roosevelt had created his first federal bird reservation at Pelican Island, Florida. Now, with Dr. Merriam of the Biological Survey still his steadfast ally, Roosevelt began rapidly declaring federal bird reservations during the last six weeks of his administration. He began with the Hawaiian territory: on February 3, he signed Executive Order 1019, declaring an entire archipelago of the Hawaiian Islands a federal bird reservation.
In 1903 Roosevelt had sent U.S. Marines to safeguard the seabirds of the Midway atoll, securing it as an American possession. Now he was saving the relatively nearby islands around Nihoa Island to Kure atoll from plumers and Japanese poachers. If you looked in an atlas for these flyspeck islands—west of the world’s largest lighthouse, on Kauai—the phrase “far-flung” might come to mind. But although human civilization might not have been thriving in this island group, the birds were there in magnificent numbers.12 “To many these remote, shimmering, uninhabited islands are devoid of interest; to the naturalist, however, every square foot of the surface, and all the life that inhabits them, has an interesting story to tell,” a professor of zoology, William Alanson Bryan of the College of Hawaii, remarked in 1915. “The geologist finds in them subjects of the greatest interest and importance.”13
When Mark Twain wrote Roughing It in 1871, he presented Hawaii to the American reading public as an exotic place. Geologically, Twain had focused on a volcano (a “muffled torch”), claiming that in Hawaii lava flowed like a “pillar of fire.”14 To Roosevelt this was a sure sign of a lazy journalist resorting to clichés: Twain made no mention of humpback whales, spinner dolphins, koa trees, or yellow hibiscuses. And then there was Jack London, who went to Hawaii in the yacht Snark but knew nothing of sea urchins or the numerous types of dolphins and sadly believed that he grew funnier as the bottle emptied. Robert Louis Stevenson had spent time in Hawaii during 1889, but he had chosen to focus on leprosy.
From Roosevelt’s perspective any indigenous Hawaiian chant—for example, the Kauai prayer “Hanohano Pihanakalani”—had more connection to the natural environment of Hawaii than a page by Twain, London, or Stevenson. Natives sang of the exquisite uplands, mountain shells, mokihana trees, and rare terns.15 But the literary “nature fakers” gave false pre-Darwinian descriptions of tropical vegetation that didn’t even exist on the islands. Didn’t Twain have eyes for the Hawaiian stilt, with its long pink legs? Couldn’t London comment on the green sea turtles? Wasn’t Stevenson competent enough to write about one of the forty species of sharks in the waters of Hawaii? The point was obvious: these literary men couldn’t have distinguished a hammerhead from a whitetip reef shark. Why didn’t important American writers study Hawaiian coral reefs, home to more than 7,000 marine species? Roosevelt believed that an accurate inventory of Hawaii’s fauna and flora in the form of a popular book was sadly needed.
Roosevelt’s intense interest in Hawaii went back to his expansionist fever of the 1890s. In 1893, in fact, Roosevelt had cheered as American colonists, mainly sugarcane growers, toppled a kingdom and replaced it with the republic of Hawaii. As assistant secretary of the navy he had lobbied Congress fervently to annex the island for strategic reasons. That effort had become a standard part of his public business in 1898. On April 30, 1900, Hawaii finally became an official U.S. territory; and a jubilant Roosevelt couldn’t wait to loll on the sand beaches, watching the surf roll in, perhaps using the Hawaiian Islands as stepping-stones on his way to Japan or Australia.
Doing his homework, Roosevelt now homed in on saving the far northwestern Hawaiian Island chain in the mid-Pacific, including Nihoa, Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, Maro Reef, Laysan Island, Lisianski Island, and Pearl and Hermes atolls, before leaving the White House. There were twenty-one islands plus smaller ones contiguous to the big nine. Executive Order 1019 designated the entire chain as a single federal bird reservation.* While Pearl Harbor was the supreme port, the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation had such stunningly diverse wildlife—including blue gray noddies, wolf spiders, and monk seals—that as an ecosystem it defied classification.16 Geologists supposed that these islands were the summits of submerged mountains, but that was only a guess. An intruder’s foot would step on a bird burrow with practically every stride.17 Everywhere there are birds,” ornithologist William Palmer wrote on the islands of Executive Order 1019, “thousands upon thousands of albatross, white and brown, in great, distinct colonies; great rookeries of terns and petrels and frigate birds; countless rail run everywhere in the long grass; bright red tropical honey birds, bright yellow finches flutter in the shrubs; curlews scream; ducks quack; crake chirp all the day.”18
Today, 100 years after Roosevelt created the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation, many of the small lagoons have still not been mapped. Biologists called the archipelago a wonder of ornithological activity. On French Frigate Shoals alone, in 1909 there were eighteen species of sea-birds including the rare black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross, Bonnien petrel, Bulwer’s petrel, and wedge-tailed shearwater, among other unusual species. On French Frigates Shoals a 120-foot volcanic rock rose over the lagoon, which was alive with
growing reefs.19 At Gardner Pinnacles—two barren-looking rock outcroppings—new spider species would soon be discovered. The first aerial photograph of Maro Reef showed a pork-chop-shaped atoll in which the coral reefs shot out like spokes from a huge wheel. Discovered by an American whaling ship in 1920, Maro Reef was a “rough quadrangular wreath of white breakers.”20
A real Robinson Crusoe adventure could be had at Laysan Island, where few if any human footprints could be found. The island was discovered in 1828 by an American captain sailing to the Orient, and the ornithologist Walter K. Fisher had spent a week there during Roosevelt’s presidency, declaring in National Geographic that it was one of the most remarkable places on the planet; bold young albatrosses came up to him to be patted.21 The island—three miles in length and two and a half miles in breadth—was a wondrous kingdom for ornithologists because it had a highly saline lake (one of only a few natural lakes in all of Hawaii around which birds congregated).22 Just as there is now regular or premium gasoline, guano from Laysan Island was once considered the best fertilizer. The specific mix of bird excrement and coral sand formed a rich calcium phosphate coveted for fuel in California.23
What angered Roosevelt in February 1909 was that shiploads of rabbits had been released on Laysan Island by a Honolulu slaughterhouse firm in the hope that these hares would get fat on the thick vegetation—then, when they were at their maximum weight, they would be killed for a shish kebab eaten at Honolulu luaus. The problem was that the rabbits were devastating the tropical ecosystem of the island. Rare plants were being eaten down to nubs.24 By issuing Executive Order 1019, Roosevelt officially banned such releases of rabbits. Preservationist discipline had arrived in the Hawaiian Territory. Because Laysan Island was so remote, however, policing it to enforce the law against plumers and rabbit raisers would be difficult. Since the entire Hawaiian Island Federal Bird Reservation was administered by USDA, which didn’t own boats in Hawaii, Roosevelt employed vessels of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service to patrol against poachers and rabbit breeders. The U.S. fish commissioner likewise was ordered to protect the new federal bird reservation, including the ocean whales, from commercial fishing and hunting companies.25
There was also an archaeological component to the Hawaii Islands Federal Bird Reservation. On the small basalt island of Necker, only forty-six acres in area, numerous religious relics had been discovered. Fifty-five “cultural places” were unearthed there. Many of the discoveries were stone enclosures designated as wahi pana (religious shrines) and filled with makamae (cultural artifacts). Supposedly, Necker Island had been the last refuge for a Pygmy-like race, the Menchune, who had been chased there by Polynesians. Over the centuries, native Hawaiians made Necker a sacred ceremonial site. In 1988, the George H. W. Bush Administration would list all of Necker Island on the National Register of Historic Places.26 Every square inch of the island—700 miles northwest of Honolulu—was an antiquities site.
Marine biologists today consider Roosevelt’s Executive Order 1019 a stupendous moment in oceanographic history because it preserved the great bird and seal rookeries of Hawaii from human exploitation. Now called the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the chain continues to serve as nesting areas for more than 14 million breeding seabirds, waterfowl, wintering shorebirds, endangered turtles and seals, and legions of whales. It was Roosevelt’s counterpart of the Galápagos, a gift to marine biology, the world’s largest oceanic conservation area, where evolution was happening incrementally in a discernible way. Here, in the westernmost islands of Hawaii, the food chain remained intact.
Yet if you pick up a Hawaiian guidebook at, say, Barnes & Noble and thumb through the index, you probably won’t find Roosevelt’s name. This omission is based on Roosevelt’s never having visited Hawaii in a fishing craft, yacht, or naval vessel. But you will learn in Hawaiian guidebooks that Twain said that Oahu “beseechingly” haunted him, that Stevenson found the leprosy colony “a land of disfigurement and disease,” and that London had called himself a kama’aina (“child of the island”). Only Roosevelt himself, in his A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), noted the importance of Executive Order 1019 to the marine biology of what he called “the western extension of the Hawaiian archipelagos.”27
Because Hawaii was a territory in 1909—it did not become a state until 1959—there was no dissent from Capitol Hill over Executive Order 1019. Only the Hawaiian rabbit breeders and eggers were up in arms. The territorial governor, Walter Frear of California, likewise had a few grumbles. None of this amounted to more than a few angry letters for public consumption. In 1911 the Field Museum of Chicago sent Charles A. Corwin to the Hawaiian Islands Federal Bird Reservation to inventory species. His report on Laysan Island alone was so impressive that it made national news. “It has been established that the island is inhabited by at least 8,000,000 birds, most of which consist of two species of Albatross,” Corwin wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, a publication that took ornithology seriously. “There were so many birds on the ground, nesting, that we had to crowd our way through to avoid stepping on them…. We can fully verify the stories that these strange birds have a peculiar dance which resembles the cake walk. They clap their bills together and waddle about with high stepping antics, ducking their heads first under one wing, then under the other. All through the dance they whistle and utter weird sounds.”28
With the Hawaii Islands Federal Bird Reserve created, the Biological Survey sent Roosevelt an additional twenty-five bird reservations to sign before March 4. While the reporters were abuzz over Taft’s choices for his cabinet and about the inaugural festivities, the Roosevelt administration would stealthily save birds’ breeding grounds. Unnoticed by the Washington Post and New York Times, the final “I So Declare It” hour had arrived for American ornithologists. Suggestions from Job, Finley, Dutcher, Chapman, Beebe, and other enthusiasts came pouring into the Biological Survey office at the Department of Agriculture. There was a real sense of urgency. On February 25, it virtually rained federal bird reservations in America, and nobody in interregnum Washington had the power to object. For ornithologists of the twenty-first century, these areas are hallowed not only because of their wildlife but also for their green underbrush and marshlands: Salt River (Arizona), Deer Flat and Minidoka (Idaho), Willow Creek (Montana), Carlsbad and Rio Grande (New Mexico), Cold Springs (Oregon), Belle Fourche (South Dakota), Strawberry Valley (Utah), Keechelus, Kachess, Clealum, Bumping Lake and Conconully (Washington), Pathfinder and Shoshone (Wyoming).
What fantastic American names! Stephen Vincent Benét should have written a poem about them. Just reading them aloud is poetry. The two federal bird reservations that the Roosevelt administration likewise created in California were very special, unique in their biodiversity. First, on February 25, came East Park, located in Colusa County an hour north of Sacramento. Here thousands of swans were struggling to coexist with humans around the cool water of a medium-size lake. A very rare tri-color blackbird also used the watering-hole as a home base for much of the year.29 In springtime the rolling hills of East Park bloomed with the rare adobe lily (Fritillaria pluriflora) and residents of Sacramento came to camp along the lake free of charge. In 1921 the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior took over control of East Lake. Nowadays, even with a hydroelectric dam, the thriving birdlife and flower fields remain federally protected.
But the true gemstone of February was the Farallon Islands, a spectacular cluster of rocky islands in the Pacific Ocean twenty-five miles from Golden Gate Bridge. An inventory of wildlife in the Farallons runs for pages. The islands remain the largest nesting colony south of Alaska and the world’s biggest colony of western gulls. Half of the ashy storm petrels continue to reside on these offshore bird rocks. Marine whales congregate around the Farallons, as do southern sea otters, Dall’s porpoises, minke whales, orcas, and northern elephant seals. Every square foot is full of special designs. Although vegetation is limited, there are clusters of pigweed, tree mal
low, false clover, plantain, curly dock, and Monterey cypress. Little skiffs from the San Francisco Bay area often circled around the islands (the largest island is seventy acres in area) to see the colorful tufted puffin or watch two-ton elephant seals at Saddle Rock dispute during the breeding season over harems. A biological site of the rarest kind, the Farallons were influenced by the California current, westward winds, upwelling mixing, deep cold water, and finally, in February 1909, by the Roosevelt administration’s “citizen bird” policy.30
From Hawaii to Florida and Michigan to Alaska, birding areas and habitats were put off-limits and set aside for the future. Their status would be enforced by the Biological Survey, National Audubon Society, and AOU. In Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Louisiana, and Florida the plumers were isolated and suppressed, forced to operate clandestinely, like criminals. And when Roosevelt wrote that birds should be saved for reasons “unconnected with dollars and cents,” he wasn’t speaking just for himself.31 Groups like the National Audubon Society and AOU had swept across the land. The unstated presumption was that weird beaks, webbed claws, and wingspreads had aesthetic value for a generation of Americans who championed “citizen bird” and were fed up with market butchers. When Senator George C. Perkins, (among other things) a forestry advocate, questioned T.R. over wildlife protection policy the president snapped. “I would like to break the neck of the feebly malicious angleworm who occupies the other seat as California’s Senator,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Ted; “he is a milk-faced grub named Perkins.”32
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