The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (120 page)

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.”
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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.
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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).
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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!”
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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 needed 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.
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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.”
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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.
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First by one bureaucratic trick, then by another, Roosevelt accomplished his overarching goal of protecting birds’ habitats. His cleverest tactic was to preserve a group of islets under a single name (for instance, Quillayute Needles in Washington state). Florida’s fishermen and its millinery industry accused Roosevelt of grabbing land. The many islands he saved were like a rash, they believed, breaking out wherever an honest land or water bounty might be had. Take Pine Island, for example—the refuge Roosevelt created on the southwest coast of Florida (north of Sanibel Island in Pine Island Sound) in the autumn of 1908. This federal bird reservation was actually three isolated islands inhabited by thousands of brown pelicans.
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Roosevelt could have declared a number of refuges around Pine Island, but he didn’t. With the agility of a professional politician, and understanding the mental laziness of many uninvolved citizens, he was able to disarm his opponents (whose greed, he felt, was pitted against his own sense of public good). By
not
establishing multiple refuges, Roosevelt made the preservation seem slighter. His detractors now had to object to Pine Island as a single entity. If he had instead issued three separate executive orders, cries against such a “land grab” would surely have been heard throughout Congress instead of merely in the hamlets of Lee County, Florida. A single entity was also convenient. It took only one executive order—Number 939—to save Pine Island as a priceless marine ecosystem where wildlife could flourish. Only a decision by the Supreme Court could have reversed his order, which he issued on September 15. And Roosevelt had powerful allies in the Gulf Coast to make sure this didn’t happen.

At Island Bay the Audubon Society’s game warden was Columbus B. McLeod—short, bad-tempered, and something of a hermit. His salary of thirty-five dollars a month was paid for by the National Association of Audubon Societies’ Thayer Fund. With his motorboat regularly plying the waters of Charlotte Harbor, McLeod also served as the deputy sheriff of Desoto County (present-day Desoto, Charlotte, Hardee, Glades, and Highlands counties), applying warrants and arresting poachers.
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McLeod—Paul Kroegel’s counterpart on the Florida Gulf coast—was almost sixty, unmarried, and an outdoorsman. He was a friend of the manatees but his primary purpose in life was to protect egrets and roseate spoonbills from extraction. Florida was a bird paradise, he believed,
but if the plumer gangs weren’t broken up, even the white pelicans would vanish. Warden McLeod would fearlessly motor up to bands of illegal hunters and threaten to have them busted, drowned, run down, hanged, and marched off in shackles—all at once if need be—if they didn’t leave the Roosevelt administration’s rookeries alone. Some of his rows with these hunters should probably have been covered in the
Tampa Tribune
, but fisticuffs were part of daily life along the Gulf shore. “I protected the Sunset Island Colony for three years in my feeble way without a cent of compensation except the love I had for the wild, free birds and the pleasure it gave me to save the lives of every single bird that I could,” McLeod wrote in the fall of 1908, in a report to the Audubon Society. “Since that time you have engaged me as a warden for the Audubon Societies, with a salary and nice little boats, which allowed me to look after their [the birds’] interests more and give them better protection.”
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McLeod received his mail on the island hamlet of Placida, but he actually lived on Cayo Pelau Island (116 acres of wetland mangrove and ten acres of uplands). With three sandy beaches and rare tropical hardwood hammocks to call his own, he was living the fleabitten life of an outback type. He was poor, but not as poor as the Seminoles. Sometimes he would take a canoe on the lower Peace River, in perfect harmony with his environment. Although biographical information about McLeod’s daily activities remains sketchy (he didn’t keep a diary as Kroegel sometimes did), he patrolled the Charlotte Harbor rookeries around Gasparilla Sound, chasing away poachers with his boat, badge, and gun. McLeod wrote an emergency report for
The Auk
in 1907, on protecting roseate spoonbills. As a wildlife warden, he worried that enforcement of the Lacey Act was too lax, that the good old boys of Florida simply spat at federal laws. At times, their arrogance made him weep in frustration and dismay. “No Trespassing” signs, he understood, didn’t mean much in the matted thickets of southwest Florida. But McLeod had the tough soul of an outdoorsman and lit out after hunters in both boat and prose. “Five years ago there was a fine flock of roseate spoonbills or ‘Pink Curlews’ that used and did their feeding in the northeast end of Turtle Bay,” he said; “only 18 are left now of the flock, and they have for the past two seasons done their feeding on my home island in the fall, and winter months. Hunters and tourists killed them, and there are but few left on the Gulf Coast of Florida.”
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