Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists

11. Hellcat

Even in the grim weeks before and after Pearl Harbor, Rosalie Edge could be found at her post on the conservation front. The nation was in no position to consider new national parks, but she continued her fight for unpopular causes of nature. At the end of 1941, Edge went to a congressional hearing to oppose the eradication of livestock tick infestations in parts of Florida using insecticides; she feared what wide applications of the poison might do to deer and other wild creatures. She suggested that the livestock owners dip their cattle rather than expose all wildlife to toxic substances. In 1939 Secretary Ickes had finally dismantled the Bureau of Biological Survey, no doubt under Edge’s influence. Certain Biological Survey functions were retained and combined with elements of the Bureau of Fisheries that the empire-building interior secretary had acquired from the Department of Commerce . The Fish and Wildlife Service formed from this union was presumably more to the secretary’s liking and to Rosalie Edge’s. Its mission focused on the management of federal wildlife refuges, a more life-affirming emphasis than that of the old Biological Survey. But ingrained practices died slowly, and livestock interests still requested federal expenditures for the eradication of one nuisance species or another. Edge’s testimony regarding the cattle-tick issue did not make headlines the way her [ chapter eleven Hellcat 236 ] chapter eleven national-park testimony had. Yet lawmakers now respected her peculiar credentials to address ecological esoterica. “I am not myself a scientist,” Edge began, although by this time this fact was well known to the congressmen . “The men in the museums and in universities have not the time, and they have not often the political acumen that is necessary to express themselves . They express themselves through me, and through my committee, and I pass on information to bodies such as this.” It was her duty to educate the senators since they obviously knew nothing of “sciences, entomology, ticks, and mammals.” “Please do not limit it to that,” interjected Senator James O’Connor. “We are all human, Mr. Chairman,” she offered magnanimously. In the fall of 1941, with war fever high, Edge learned from Fish and Wildlife director Ira Gabrielson that the army planned to use the short flyway of the few remaining trumpeter swans near Yellowstone National Park as a practice artillery range. The extinction of the largest native bird in the lower forty-eight states was virtually guaranteed if their flyway was used in this manner. Her request for the range to be relocated was rejected by the War Department. At the Colony Club, friends thought she was joking when she told them over bridge one day what she was trying to do. Edge attempted to rally conservationist opposition, but she was considered unpatriotic by everyone but her old ally Irving Brant, who egged her on. At Brant’s urging she sent copies of her correspondence with the army to President Roosevelt, Vice President Harry Truman, and Secretary of War Stimson. Brant notified Ickes, who also sent a memo to Roosevelt repeating Edge’s arguments for moving the artillery range out of the trumpeters’ flight path. Four days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Edge received a letter from Major General E. S. Adams stating that “appropriate steps [were] being taken to discontinue all planning activities in connection with that site.” The Colony Club ladies were impressed, or so Edge wrote later of the episode . “Fancy the War Department changing its plans for swans!” the doubters marveled over their next bridge game. Edge then presented the perilous circumstances of the trumpeter swan to Ira Gabrielson, the director of the new Fish and Wildlife Service of whom she had approved. Gabrielson had been a strong backer of the ecc. Captive breeding of trumpeter swans had worked elsewhere, she told him. Might the service institute such a program? Fish and Wildlife began to breed captive trumpeters and saved the big birds. hellcat [ 237 when the united states entered the war, twenty-eight-year-old Peter Edge sought a coast guard commission, and thirty-seven-year-old Maurice Broun enlisted in the navy. Irma moved back with her family at the Penniman mansion on Cape Cod for the duration. Rosalie refused to leave Hawk Mountain Sanctuary unguarded and hired a local man, Fran Trembly, to regularly check the grounds and count the birds. Maurice had grown to be...