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a federal law prohibiting the export of timber boards harvested from the Chugach or Tongass to any non-American market. These trees—alive or chopped—belonged to the American people. Southeastern Alaskan businessmen, in particular, protested against what they perceived as a federal stranglehold on potential timber crops. Why should citizens of Sitka or Ketchikan be denied global free trade? Roosevelt—and his small cadre of Pinchotian forestry experts operating in Alaska—argued that the Tongass and Chugach national forests actually helped frontier enclaves become sustainable communities instead of boomtowns. The Chugach and the Tongass were an inheritance to be passed on to future generations like jewels, gifts for time immemorial.

IV

Besides the Tongass and Chugach reserves, Roosevelt created gigantic bird refuges of inestimable merit in the Alaskan territory. Far from being an empty icebox, Alaska, Roosevelt knew, was green for half the year, owing to the long days of the Alaskan summer, and swarming with great flocks of birds in every direction. The various loons—common (Gavia immer), yellow-billed (G. adamsii), red-throated (G. stellata), Pacific (G. pacifica), arctic (G. arctica)—were so commonplace that their haunting call was heard even in the Brooks Range, and it came to symbolize the North Slope. The significant date for Alaskan wildlife protection was February 27, 1909, during Roosevelt’s last two weeks as president, while all the political pundits were focused on the appointees of the incoming Taft administration. In 1909, TR proclaimed six federal bird reservations in Alaska by means of executive orders: Tuxedni, Saint Lazaria, Yukon Delta, Bering, Pribilof, and Bogoslof. They were far bigger in scope than all of his administration’s previous bird reserves in places such as Florida, Oregon, and Louisiana. And the Alaskan reserves were unsurveyed. To Roosevelt, hunting game birds for sport or science wasn’t a sin, but as a die-hard member of the Audubon Society he believed that killing an American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) or black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapilla) just for the hell of it was a crime against God.

First among Roosevelt’s Alaskan bird sanctuaries was the Yukon Delta Reservation (today known as Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge)—eventually more than 16 million acres of flat delta stitched with rivers (mainly the Yukon and Kuskokwim) and dotted with hundreds of lakes, creeks, sloughs, and ponds. Roaming this huge lake-spattered tundra along the Bering Sea—the second largest in the United States, after the Mississippi—were caribou, lynx (Lynx canadensis), bears, and wolves (Canis lupus). Roosevelt knew, from E. W. Nelson of the Biological Survey, that in terms of density and biological diversity, the Yukon Delta terrain, like the Sacramento Valley, was an essential shorebird nesting area in the United States, the size of South Carolina. In the 1870s Nelson had brought back to Washington, D.C., nests and eggs from the salmon-rich Yukon Delta, to study them more carefully than he could on the marshy tundra.48 The reserve Roosevelt created was the size of South Carolina.49

Birds from six major flyways—from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern coast of Asia—would nest on the Yukon Delta or stop to rest and feed on their way to farther-off nesting grounds. Almost the entire world populations of bristle-thighed curlews (Numenius tahitiensis) and black turnstones (Arenaria melanocephala) breed there. Sheets of white birds often blanketed the landscape, making it look like a cotton field in Dixieland. Clouds of geese and ducks regularly swept across the sky, headed for the vast marshland during the great rush of spring. (Two of the sea ducks that regularly visited the Yukon Delta—the spectacled eider (Somateria fischeri) and Steller’s eider—are now listed as threatened and are protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act.50

On February 27, 1909, Roosevelt created the Tuxedni Federal Bird Reservation (consisting of Chisik Island and Duck Island) with Executive Order No. 1039. The order provided