The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (60 page)

Just eight months before the second annual message, at the urging of
Chapman, Roosevelt had signed the Hallock Bird Protection Bill. As of May 2, 1900, it was illegal to kill and sell nongame birds for commercial purposes in New York. For the first time a state government was earnestly in the business of birds’ rights.
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The bill—named after the naturalist author Charles Hallock, a former Yalie who had founded
Forest and Stream
, and sponsored by the Audubon Society—regulated the hunting of birds in New York.
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Hallock was a hero to both Roosevelt and Grinnell and had a catholicity of interests to equal Thomas Jefferson’s. Besides founding
Forest and Stream
he was the leading expert on sunflowers (using the seeds to make clean fuel), established a game reserve in Minnesota, and originated the uniform code of game laws in America. His
Camp Life in Florida
had a huge impact on Roosevelt’s eco-sensibility. Hallock wrote fine books about angling, including
The Salmon Fisher
(1890). It was Hallock’s
Vacation Rambles in Michigan
(1877), in fact, that taught Roosevelt much of what he knew about the Great Lakes. Hallock maintained that America had four main flyways—Atlantic, Mississippi, Central and Pacific—and his bill would make sure they stayed as they were. Roosevelt was upbeat that America’s recklessness toward migratory birds could be rolled back.

Chapman, at the governor’s request, toured millinary factories after the law was enacted, threatening state-sanctioned shutdowns if any illegal plumage was found. Roosevelt let the Millinary Merchants Protective Association—an organization he despised—know that undercover “Audubonists” would be inspecting facilities at his request. His threat was unambiguous: the Hallock Bill had to be adhered to, and lawbreakers would be arrested.
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As John Burroughs noted, when “unholding laws like the Hallock Bill,” Roosevelt was “scrupulous in morals,” and “unflinching in what he thought to be his duty.”
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After signing the Hallock Bill, Roosevelt wrote Frank M. Chapman a note, praising the Audubon Society for its mission. “It would be hard to overestimate the importance of its educational effects,” Roosevelt said. “Half, and more than half the beauty of the woods and fields is gone when they lose the harmless wild things, while if we could only ever get our people to the point of taking a universal and thoroughly intelligent interest in the preservation of game birds and fish, the result would be an important addition to our food supply. Ultimately people are sure to realize that to kill off all game birds and net out all fish streams is not much more sensible than it would be to kill off all the milch cows and brood mares. As for the birds that are the special object of the preservation of
your Society we should keep them just as we keep trees. They add immeasurably to the wholesome beauty of life.”
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Keep in mind, however, that Governor Roosevelt wasn’t working in a vacuum when he signed the Hallock Bird Proection Bill. By the time he had been sworn in as governor in January 1899, studying the typology of birds had become a popular movement in America, in large part because of the success of the Audubon Society’s first national promotion of bird-watching. When Roosevelt said that
birds mattered
, millions of people listened because they were already predisposed to the Audubon movement and admired its new celebrity spokesperson. Not that Roosevelt was opposed to killing birds for science—far from it. Only by collecting specimens could a naturalist like himself properly study eye lines for su-perciliary stripes, eye rings, spectacles, mustache marks, malar marks, and ear patches.
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What infuriated Roosevelt and aroused his righteous indignation, were the market hunters who were harming not just New York but the entire Florida ecosystem. When he invited ornithologists to the executive mansion in Albany, Roosevelt would hold court, floating various ideas on how to derail the millinary industry.

Governor Roosevelt used his new political authority and his status as a war hero to lash out at what John Burroughs (in
Signs and Seasons
) called “bird highwaymen.” After the Hallock Bill, these millinary plunderers’ destruction, both naturalists believed, had to end in criminal suits. (Unfortunately for Roosevelt and the conservation movement, the modern-day concept of class-action suits against despoilers of the environment did not come to fruition until the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 in 1938.) As far back as 1886, with venom pouring from his pen, Burroughs had gone after the “bird highwaymen” and even science-minded men who overcollected. “The professional nest-robber and skin-collector should be put down,” Burroughs wrote, using the kind of fierce language Roosevelt admired, “either by legislation or with dogs and shotguns.”
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Burroughs was first and foremost a bird lover. He knew how to tread quietly in a woods or marsh so as not to scare the birds away. Like Roosevelt, he used his ears as much as his eyes. He looked for particularly rare species at dawn and dusk, when they were most active. Seldom did he disturb birds that were courting or nesting. He trained himself to detect small movements in the woods, usually by looking out of the corner of his eyes. Sometimes Burroughs would make a squeaking or pishing noise to attract curious songbirds. This seemed to work like a charm with chickadees and kinglets. Burroughs marveled that there were
5 billion wild birds in North America. But extinctions of species like the Labrador duck and the great auk were far too frequent. Every town, Burroughs believed, needed an Audubon Society so that birdsong could seep into people’s consciousness.

V

Among all these birds’ rights activists who gravitated around Burroughs, Grinnell, and Roosevelt, none were as politically effective at reducing market hunting as William Dutcher of New York. Dutcher—who had a grayish beard like Andrew Carnegie’s, wore rimless spectacles, and kept his hair neatly parted—dedicated thirty years of his life to the “citizen bird” movement. At first glance, Dutcher’s face suggested a buttoned-down “old chap,” a man dutiful about fulfilling obligations and the handshake agreements like those made in the days before the telegraph. Born in New Jersey during the Mexican War, Dutcher was raised to become an apprentice Wall Street banker. But, for whatever reasons, his health faltered in the city. Coughing fits, headaches, bronchitis, sinusitis, although not seriously debilitating, flared up chronically, making him miserable. Repairing to a farm near Springfield, Massachusetts, filling his lungs with fresh air, and hiking through the unfenced woods along the Connecticut River revived Dutcher, and he had an inspiration. Nature, he came to believe, had curative powers more potent than the homeopathic nostrums being peddled in his local pharmacy.

Returning to New York to earn a living, and to make something of himself, Dutcher joined the Brooklyn Life Insurance Company, where he worked his way up from cashier to secretary to top agent. Not unhandsome or overly sophisticated, Dutcher was what the sociologist William H. Whyte, in the 1950s, would call an “organization man,” dressed for success and unflaggingly loyal to his boss. Living in Manhattan, however, once again took a toll on his precarious health. All the nagging symptoms he had experienced as a teenager came back, causing him to feel like a voodoo doll being pinpricked by every allergen known to mankind. Relief came only when he escaped for weekend trips to hunt snipes, ducks, and geese. One afternoon at Shinnecock Bay on Long Island he shot a beautiful Wilson’s plover. Intrigued by this shorebird’s white forehead and distinctive eye stripe, he decided to have the taxidermist John Bell—Audubon’s student, who had taught Theodore Roosevelt as a boy—mount it. Bell’s museum-quality product, he figured, would bring some much-needed flair to his rather drab office at the insurance company.

From that single Wilson’s plover grew one of the best bird collec
tions in New York. Dutcher learned that this plover was named after the pioneering ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who shot a specimen in Cape May, New Jersey in 1813. Dutcher may perhaps have thought that someday a bird would be named after him. Certainly he could have imagined few greater honors. If he opened up new windows in ornithology he was sure others would follow him. With the zeal of a smitten hobbyist, Dutcher became infatuated with all the birds of Long Island. That was his niche as a collector. Every weekend, even in winter, he could be found shooting double-crested cormorants, American golden plovers, and harlequin ducks with his .410-gauge along the North Shore and even at the far-off tip of the island.
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With great steadiness, he would carefully skin his birds by first making an incision in the breast and belly. Then he would peel the skin off the carcass and remove the meat, replacing it with cotton. An arsenic paste was then rubbed all over the feathers to deter insects while the specimen was drying. Writing out insurance policies by day, and reading John Burroughs by night, and applying the arsenic on weekends, Dutcher, the taxidermist-ornithologist, stepped out of the corporate shadows to become the world’s authority on Long Island birds, with his only real rival being Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay.

In September 1883, after a summer of collecting specimens on Long Island, Dutcher was elected an associate member of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), the new nonprofit organization promoting avian rights. (He would also participate in the first Audubon movement in 1886.) From his cluttered office at 51 Liberty Street—when he wasn’t wrestling with insurance claims—Dutcher carefully crafted position papers for the AOU to disseminate and squeezed annual dues from new members. Refusing to let the AOU become ineffectual, he was fervent about stopping the slaughter of birds. He was no martyr, but it didn’t take his colleagues at AOU long to realize that he was a workhorse.

Undoubtedly the most tireless member of AOU’s Protection of North American Birds Committee, Dutcher evolved into a strong conservationist, determined to win the battle, never concealing his emotions, drafting model laws to protect nongame birds, and coordinating activities between the various state Audubon societies that were springing up along the Atlantic coast. Determined to thwart the plumers, Dutcher, with the financial assistance of Abbot H. Thayer, created a fund to protect colonies of U.S. seabirds from Maine to Florida. The Thayer Fund, as it was called, had the distinction of being the first conservation effort solely dedicated to saving herons, egrets, pelicans, and hundreds of other sea-birds from extinction. A simple philanthropic rule of thumb for William
Dutcher was, “If John James Audubon painted it, the Thayer Fund would protect it.”

What made Dutcher an effective lobbyist was his single-minded devotion to his winged clients. Like a determined town crier, he was impossible to silence. He saw setbacks not as defeats, but only as retrenchments. Always, at any hour or minute, when it came to birds’ rights he had skin in the game. (In other words, he was a fanatic.) As much as he admired Burroughs’s poetic musing about hermit thrushes and the common sparrow, birds’ rights, he believed, would be won through the legislative process. Laws were elastic, and he planned to take full advantage of that fact. If the Boone and Crockett Club could lobby successfully for timberland reserves and for the protection of Yellowstone Park, then there was no reason he couldn’t achieve model bird laws. Cordial, determined, and always armed with data, Dutcher headed to Albany in an effort to convince the New York legislature that the gulls and terns of the Empire State deserved protection. With Governor Roosevelt and John Burroughs cheering him on, Dutcher persuaded the legislators to approve the assigning of a few wardens all around Long Island to safeguard seabirds’ breeding grounds. If Albany agreed to this conservation plan, the AOU, through the Thayer Fund, would foot the employment costs. Dutcher won, and immediately the fund paid for the new wardens to keep what he called “brutalists” in check.

The AOU’s victory in New York was just the beginning. The indefatigable Dutcher (a devout Episcopalian) traveled up and down the Atlantic Coast like an itinerant preacher offering revival meetings on behalf of birds. Promoting the gospel of birds, actively selling what he called the AOU model law (or Audubon law), Dutcher scored legislative victories in Boston, Trenton, Hartford, and Augusta, Maine. But those were all Yankee capitals, the home turf of legislators who were apt to accept the conservationist arguments of the day. As Governor Roosevelt understood, with characteristic realism, his real challenge would be in Florida, part of the old Confederacy, where the avian slaughter had become big business. What good would it do to protect birds in New York, only to have them slaughtered when they migrated to Florida? To truly protect the sheer diversity of shorebirds, he would have to lobby successfully in Tallahassee.

On March 2, 1900, at the L. F. Dommerich estate in Maitland, Florida—an elegant resort town where presidents Grover Cleveland and Chester Arthur had both wintered—an inaugural meeting of the Florida Audubon Society (FAS) was held. The participants were largely central
Floridians, but the new governor of New York—Theodore Roosevelt—was asked be an officer. (This meeting took place two months before the Hallock Bird Protection Bill was passed in New York.) Concerned about “citizen bird,” and eager to save Florida’s wildlife from human predators, Roosevelt gladly accepted. Most of the other founders, by contrast, lived in Florida, including Governor W. D. Bloxham and G. M. Ward, the president of Rollins College. Recognizing that Governor Roosevelt was the single most popular advocate for birds’ rights in the nation, a friend of pelicans (both brown and white), Dutcher embraced him, you might say, as a parvenu embraces an heiress. Even though the relationship was initially based on Roosevelt’s providing political muscle for Dutcher’s cause, an abiding affection developed between these two bird lovers.
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That afternoon in Maitland, when the FAS joined the existing twenty-four state chapters of the Audubon Society, was the day of salvation for Florida’s wildlife. The creation of FAS meant that bird lovers no longer felt discouraged or inept. In unity there was power. And with the popular Governor Roosevelt on board, it was harder for the opposition to dismiss the protectors of pelicans and terns as cranks holding conch shells to their ears to hear plumers’ distant gunfire. Unfortunately, Clara Dommerich, a fan of T.R.’s who was known for her bullish stubbornness and was the real driving force of FAS, became ill and died just eight months later. Her funeral, however, was the occasion of a rallying cry for birds. Women in Florida not only started boycotting plumers but created Audubon clubs in town after town to keep Dommerich’s and Roosevelt’s message alive. Of FAS’s founders, ten were women and five were men. Katherine Tippetts, for example, opened a branch office in Saint Petersburg and ran it for thirty-three years, going on to serve as statewide president from 1920 to 1924. During the progressive era she became known in conservation circles as the “Florida bird woman.”
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(Her lobbying led to the creation of the entire state park system.)