The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (78 page)

The Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve was just one of thirteen reserves President Roosevelt created in 1902—all aimed at also protecting big game. These new federal forestlands totaled 14,276,476 acres. In coming years many of these forest reserves would be increased in acreage, often undergoing many boundary changes before being finalized and renamed. By the end of 1902, however, the reserves broke down as follows:

On December 2, 1902, amid this flurry of national forest legislation, Roosevelt, in his Second Annual Message to Congress, defended the le
gality of his thirteen new reserves with the passion of John Muir. This generation of Americans, he said, had a duty of handing down natural wonders, not squandering them. Whether it was the temperate rain forests of Alaska; the dazzlingly colorful fall broadleafs of the Great Lakes; the pine barrens of New Jersey; the Joshua tree terrains of the Southwest; or the supreme cottonwoods, tupelos, and bald cypress of America’s river bottoms, citizens needed to protect their trees for aesthetic and other reasons. To Roosevelt a single limb of a many-branched oak had more true wisdom than all the congressmen in session combined—except, of course, for Lacey, who was as big as a forest in the president’s mind. Furthermore, wildlife survival was, quite simply, completely dependent on trees. In line with the mission of the Boone and Crockett Club and the Audubon societies, Roosevelt also wanted written assurances from Congress that the fish along the White River, the wild turkeys of Wisconsin, and the walruses of Alaska on federal lands would be unmolested in perpetuity. “Legislation should be provided for the protection of the game, and the wild creatures generally, on the forest reserves,” he said. “The senseless slaughter of game, which can by judicious protection be permanently preserved on our National reserves for the people as a whole, should be stopped at once.”
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tarting in March 1903 President Roosevelt engaged in a Herculean effort to save the bird rookeries of Florida. Playing the role of a modern-day Noah, the committed Audubonist insisted that every bird species in Florida was a world unto itself, a masterpiece of Darwinian evolution. And these birds needed habitats to survive. Even though the term “biodiversity” would not be coined until about 1985, Roosevelt had an intuitive grasp of the concept. He worried that for some species in Florida—a hot spot for biodiversity—the death rate was far exceeding the birthrate, threatening them with extinction. The initial showdown over the future of Florida’s wildlife took place at Pelican Island, a teardrop-shaped Atlantic Coast islet situated three nautical miles from the hamlet of Sebastian. The island was home to the last breeding colony of brown pelicans on the east coast of Florida. The Indian River Lagoon basin, of which Pelican Island was a part, contained some 4,300 species of plants and animals—more species than any other estuary in the United States—including 685 types of fish and 370 bird species.
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Of all the Florida avians, it seemed that the brown pelican was Roosevelt’s personal favorite. These pelicans were to him like Keats’s nightingale or Wordsworth’s cuckoo. The brown pelicans were the finest fishermen Roosevelt knew—a far cry better than any human. That pelicans were such superb natural fishermen, however, may have enthralled the president, but it irritated the dickens out of rural Floridians. Since brown pelicans had an almost insatiable appetite for scooping up finned prey, Florida fishermen saw these birds as unwelcome competition, a hindrance to their livelihood, like woodpeckers devouring corn or mockingbirds incessantly pecking at grapevines. The mere sight of brown pelicans—flying over the low gray river with pouches chock-full of fish to feed their nestlings—made fishermen reach for a gun. The pelicans’ fishing grounds were supposed to be humans’ fishing grounds. Therefore, the pelicans had to be eradicated. What locusts were to a Nebraskan farmer or gutter rats to a Brooklyn merchant, brown pelicans were to Florida’s commercial fishermen. But to Roosevelt, pelicans were a marvelous example of Darwin’s evolutionary theory at work, and he wanted
them protected. Unlike most birds, pelicans weren’t masters of evasion; they actually liked people. Unfortunately, that made them even more vulnerable to being slaughtered for their quills, as mounts, for their eggs, and even for target practice. How they had survived so long, given their friendliness, intrigued Roosevelt.

Regularly Roosevelt would row around Long Island Sound on bird-watching adventures. He believed it was a civic responsibility to know the wildlife species that lived in your own backyard.
T.R. as a rower. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

While stationed in Tampa Bay during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had studied the brown pelicans’ daily routines with an artist’s eye for nuance. Often they glided low, within range of a pistol or slingshot, among swarms of gnats (locally known as sand flies) whose buzz may have been inaudible to humans but which nevertheless caused a man to itch. Sometimes the pelicans followed porpoises, which served as their advance agents for detecting schools of fish. Roosevelt had marveled at how good-humored pelicans could be, allowing noisy gulls to use their elongated heads as a resting spot.
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They built frail twig nests for roosts, and each pelican parent would take a turn sitting on the eggs and then dutifully standing guard, in shifts. They were a highly responsible bird species in this regard, rare and remarkable. And pelicans were just one of Florida’s wild creatures Roosevelt admired. Someday he hoped his grandchildren would see loggerhead turtles laying eggs on a Florida beach and
manatees patrolling the crystal waters of a spring-fed river. To Roosevelt there was no more nutritive truth than the order of the Abrahamic God four days after Genesis to “let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly over the land across the vault of heaven.”

Roosevelt first learned about the birds of Pelican Island from the published field notes of Dr. Henry Bryant (of the Boston Society of Natural History), recorded in 1859. Dr. Bryant, in his capacity as a professional ornithologist, scientifically recorded the scores of brown pelicans and other waterbirds he encountered on fantastically misshapen clumps of mangrove in the Indian River Lagoon. “The most extensive breeding place was on a small island called Pelican Island, about twenty miles north of Fort Capron,” Bryant wrote in his diary. “The nests here were placed on the tops of mangrove trees, which were about the size and shape of large apple trees. Breeding in company with the pelicans were thousands of herons, Peale’s egret, the rufous egret and little white egret, with a few pairs of the great blue heron and roseate spoonbills; and immense numbers of man-o-war birds and white ibises were congregated upon the island.”
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Bryant also reported that a feather hunter had recently killed sixty roseate spoonbills on Pelican Island in a single day.

The word soon spread in ornithologist circles that Pelican Island was an amazing field laboratory; there was little need to venture down to Ecuador or British Honduras. In 1879 Dr. James Henshall, following in Bryant’s footsteps, visited the Indian River Lagoon region on a collection trip, expecting the best. Traversing trails that became a trough of swamp water to get to Pelican Island, Henshall was astounded by what he encountered: the mythical rookery was now a dead zone. “The mangroves and water oaks of this island have all been killed by the excrement of the pelicans which breed here,” Henshall wrote in his journal. “This guano, which lies several inches deep on the ground, is utilized by the settlers as an efficient fertilizer. At a distance, the dead trees and bushes and ground seemed covered with frost or snow, and thousands of brown pelicans were seen flying and swimming around or perched upon the dead branches. As we passed, we saw a party of northern tourists at the island, shooting down the harmless birds by scores through mere wantonness. As volley after volley came booming over the water, we felt quite disgusted at the useless slaughter, and bore away as soon as possible and entered the Narrows.”
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Now, more than twenty years after Henshall’s disturbing report, Roosevelt was in a position to help save this little piece of Eden from destruction. As an honorary officer of the Florida Audubon Society and
a former governor of New York who had helped promote the Lacey Act, he was well acquainted with the so-called Feather Wars going on in the state between bird protectionists and hunters. Now, with the the bully pulpit at his disposal, Roosevelt was finally going to put the plumers and eggers out of business once and for all. The main thrust of his policy was to strengthen the hand of the U.S. Biological Survey in Florida, perhaps having it oversee islets like Pelican Island. A new generation of Darwinists could use Florida as an evolutionary laboratory where plants might offer medical cures and breeding habits of birds could be carefully studied. But even if Roosevelt was able to create federal bird reservations on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of Florida, he would need wardens to protect them. Luckily, the ideal wildlife warden was already living in Sebastian, overlooking Pelican Island: Paul Kroegel, known locally as the “Audubon of the Indian River.” Roosevelt, it turned out, was Kroegel’s conservationist hero. Essentially, Kroegel became the archetype of the frontline law enforcement wardens Roosevelt wanted hired all over America to help protect birdlife. Therefore, Kroegel’s story illustrates a new trend in the wildlife protection movement that Roosevelt initiated in the hope of restoring bird species: federal wildlife protection officers.

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Paul Kroegel—the man who would become Roosevelt’s first wildlife warden—was born in Chemnitz, Germany, on January 9, 1864. When he was three or four years old he became enamored of the gangly white storks (just as T.R. had been enamored of those in Dresden in 1869, when he “drew” Darwin’s theory with himself as a stork.) The sight of a stork nesting on a chimney was considered a good omen in both Chemnitz and Dresden. Also, because these migratory birds often arrived in Germany around Easter, the coming of the stork was, to northern Europeans of Teutonic ancestry, a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not only did German children like Paul Kroegel refrain from killing white storks; they thought of storks as holy birds imbued with eternal nobility. Germans, of course, weren’t the only Europeans to admire storks. According to ancient Greek mythology, a white stork was a fertility symbol. If a woman made direct eye contact with such a stork, she could receive the blessing of a newborn child. In Scandinavia white storks were believed to find human children (“stork children”) living in marshes or caves, to clutch them with their red claws, and to deliver them to the doorstep of pregnant women.
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In northern Germany storks were also thought to bring babies.
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This reverential attitude toward the long-legged birds was reinforced in young Kroegel by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic children’s story “The Storks.” Andersen, a Dane, was a veritable storehouse of stork mythology. Danish servants, for example, believed that if people saw a stork fly into town as spring approached they would soon move residences; if they saw a stork standing, they’d retain their current employment.
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When Andersen wrote “The Storks” in 1838, the rooftops of northern Europe provided nesting areas for them. In Andersen’s fairy tale, children who taunted a maimed stork were punished: a stork delivered a dead baby brother or sister in its long beak instead of a live baby. To a child of Kroegel’s generation, impressed by Andersen’s stories, hurting a stork would be akin to molesting the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.
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On a cold Christmas Eve in 1870, when Paul Kroegel was six years old, his mother and an infant sister died during childbirth. His distraught father, Gottlob, took Paul and his two-year-old brother, Arthur, and immigrated to the United States the next year. They endured a brutal twelve-day voyage aboard the freighter S.S.
Canada
across the temptuous Atlantic. Arriving in New York, the Kroegels were deloused and given clean clothes. Paul was immediately homesick for Andersen’s storks: all of the tenement roofs in New York were populated by rat nests. After about four years on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, working in the meat business and as a jack-of-all-trades, Gottlob packed up his boys once again and first moved to Chicago and then eventually settle in Florida under the Homestead Act. Gottlob realized that Florida was his best chance of pursuing his idea of the American dream and providing a fine, healthy life for his boys.
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Lured by stories of eternal sunshine and citrus groves finer than those along the Nile River, Gottlob became a pioneer and homesteaded with Paul in the low-lying central coast of Florida between the Saint Sebastian and Indian rivers (today it is known as Indian River County).
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After a brief stay in Fernandina, Florida, Gottlob bought a small skiff to sail the 200 miles of the Saint Johns River. But, encountering a headwind, he and Paul rowed most of the way. They had their boat and supplies hauled six miles on a mule-drawn tram to the shores of the Indian River. From there, they sailed another sixty-five miles south until they came upon a high promontory along the shoreline and decided to stay. They built a palm frond home on top of Barker’s Bluff, an old Ais
Indian mound looking across the lagoon at Pelican Island. (Later that year a summer gale blew the house away, so they constructed a sturdier New England–style cottage, less vulnerable to tropical storms.)

When the Kroegels arrived in 1881, Florida was, as the novelist Wallace Stegner once wrote, a violent dreamland of “six-shooter freedom and orange-grove bliss,” a forlorn place where the soil was so luxuriant everything grew wild and the trees didn’t drop their leaves in winter.
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The Indian River region could be bleak, intimidating, and even lethal. But the lure of sunshine meant that every year more and more homesteaders arrived, using machetes to cut away palm sabal and crazy weeds to plant crops. Clearly there was something miraculous about Florida soil if—and only if—you could survive the coral snakes, diamondbacks, mosquito hordes, tropical storms, stark loneliness, and occasional frosts. Basically Florida in 1881 was like the Wild West—a frontier wilderness. Most villages like Sebastian didn’t even have a wooden water tank or a one-room schoolhouse to call their own.

By the time Paul Kroegel was a teenager, his nickname around Sebastian was “Pelican Watcher.” Just above the tide line of Pelican Island, he enjoyed watching these comical birds cavort with one another.
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(The brown pelicans reportedly did not share Pelican Island with other species from about 1882 to about 1939.) Protecting pelicans became part of his daily routine in Sebastian. Flocks of brown pelicans, in perfect formation, continually flew over his lookout home, making a steady stream of designs in the sky. Creatures of habit, brown pelicans returned to their favorite rookeries, like Pelican Island, every spring and winter to roost and lived year-round along the central coast, which overlapped the subtropical Caribbean zone and the temperate Carolinian zone. Their presence symbolized the oasis that was the Indian River Lagoon. Birds of all kinds, in fact, including man-of-wars with a wingspan of seven and a half feet, were often in migratory flux around his lagoon. There were white ibis, black-crowned night herons, and great blue herons. Sometimes the sky was so blotted with turbulent streams of wading birds that the flocks appeared like a high dome above the crystal blue lagoon. (The Indian River Lagoon was described by several early explorers and settlers as being crystal-clear and blue.) A celebrated founder of the National Association of Audubon Societies, Thomas Gilbert Pearson, in
Adventures in Bird Protection
, described the mass movement of such flocks as a “great rotating funnel.”
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But because of the plume hunters, eggers, and trigger-happy tourists, every week their numbers were dwindling.