By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

SEBASTIAN - Through freezes and hurricanes, tiny Pelican Island has literally clung to life, its sandy shores held together by little more than mangrove roots, its very existence under constant, subtle assault by the erosive currents of the Indian River Lagoon.

The national wildlife refuge that bears its name has grown to include thousands of acres on surrounding islands. The ponderous birds that made the island famous no longer number in the tens of thousands.

It is, by most measures of grandeur, as far removed from the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls as a backyard garden. And yet the attention of environmentalists across the country will be focused here Friday, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service marks the centennial of Pelican Island, the first of what has become a sprawling network of national wildlife refuges.

From its fountainhead on Florida’s Treasure Coast, the refuge system has grown to encompass 538 sites and nearly 150,000 square miles, an area equivalent to the whole of Montana’s vast rolling, rocky expanse.

With areas as varied as the 30,000-square-mile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and the half-acre Mille Lacs refuge in Minnesota under its stewardship, the wildlife service manages the world’s largest collection of conservation lands.

That it all started with a minuscule rookery for pelicans, egrets and storks was the result of a fortunate confluence of events. “Stars in alignment,” as the wildlife service’s Dorn Whitmore puts it.

Demand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for showy feathers was taking a heavy toll on Pelican Island’s inhabitants. Colorful plumes, and even entire birds, were so the rage as fashion accessories, particularly as adornments on women’s hats, that it was said bird-watchers could spot 50 different species while strolling along New York City’s Fifth Avenue, none of them among the living.

The poachers who harvested feathers for the “plumassiers” had so decimated bird populations that Pelican Island was the only remaining brown pelican nesting area on Florida’s east coast.

“Now we think of them as a ubiquitous bird,” Whitmore said. “But the brown pelican just came off the endangered species list” in 1985.

Into this backdrop stepped a handful of important - in some circles legendary - individuals.

The Florida Legislature in 1901 passed legislation protecting certain birds. A 37-year-old German immigrant named Paul Kroegel was one of four wardens hired by the Florida Audubon Society to enforce the law.

Kroegel had come to Sebastian in 1881, where he and his father settled atop Barker’s Bluff, a 60-foot high Ais Indian shell mound that overlooked Pelican Island and the poaching that went on there.

Two of the Audubon Society’s four wardens in Florida would be killed by poachers, but Kroegel was a determined defender of the the island, guarding it from his sailboat.

Standing just 5-feet-6, Kroegel wore tall hats and stood literally between “his” pelicans and the feather hunters.

In 1903, Kroegel and other early conservationists, most notably Frank Chapman of the Audubon Society, took their case for Pelican Island to President Theodore Roosevelt.

“Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?” Roosevelt is reported to have asked. “Very well, then I so declare it.”

On March 14, 1903, Roosevelt issued a brief executive order, stating that the island “is hereby reserved and set apart for the use of the Department of Agriculture as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”

Kroegel liberally interpreted the boundaries of the new refuge as the area within range of his double-barrel 10-gauge shotgun. Among those on the receiving end of one of Kroegel’s across-the-bow warning shots was industrialist Andrew Mellon, then the secretary of the treasury.

“Paul Kroegel came along at the right time,” said Whitmore of the wildlife service. “There was a fledging conservation movement and a conservation-minded president in the White House. It had to happen somewhere, and it happened here.”

Paul Tritaik, manager of the Pelican Island and adjacent Archie Carr refuges for the past 10 years, said individual activists over the past century have consistently defended the island in the tradition of Kroegel.

“There have been proposals over the years to dredge and fill the refuge, to build boat basins and docks in the refuge,” Tritaik said. “Each time the local community stood up and voiced their concerns to fend off these threats.”

The number of people in Indian River and Brevard counties who live within 5 miles of Pelican Island increased more than 44 percent between 1990 and 2000 alone, from 16,147 to 23,337. Indian River County as a whole grew by 25.2 percent during the same period, and Brevard by 28.5 percent.

“We face the same situation today as they did 100 years ago,” Whitmore said, “in which short-term economic gain is made in exchange for long-term environmental damage.”

Every new house, driveway and road increases polluting runoff, degrading the water that is the foundation of the Indian River Lagoon’s food chain.

But more than the health of the wildlife is at stake, Tritaik said. Pelican Island itself, at 2.2 acres, is less than half the size it was as recently as the 1950s. Natural forces are partly responsible for the island’s erosion, but the rate at which it is shrinking appears to have been accelerated in the past 30 years by human influences, such as the wakes of boats on the nearby Intracoastal Waterway.

Between 1975 and 2001, the number of pleasure boats registered with the state increased about 250 percent in Indian River County and by 150 percent in Brevard County.

Faced with the real prospect that the island might one day wash away, wildlife officials in 2001 dropped from a helicopter about 250 tons of fossilized oyster shells into the shallow water off its eastern shore. The hope was that the shell would act as a wave break, dissipating the energy that was eating persistently away at the island.

“For the short term we have halted the erosion,” Tritaik said. “But I’m concerned that over time we’re still going to be battling the same forces, and unless we do more we’re not going to be able to ensure that Pelican Island will be protected.”

Future restoration efforts might include filling out the island to its historic shoreline. Whatever the solution to Pelican Island’s current problems, officials are dedicated to preserving the progenitor of the modern refuge system.

“Pelican Island is not going to be the most important refuge biologically,” Whitmore said. “It’s real value is in its historical significance.”

Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
March 10, 2003 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1276 words