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that bellowed up from his very depths. Emphatic and worldly in manner, a tireless optimist with thousands of enthusiasms to juggle, in Rudyard Kipling’s terminology Roosevelt—who liked to be called the Colonel, in recognition of his service in the Spanish-American War—was quite simply a “first-class fighting man.” The journalist William Allen White perhaps summed up Roosevelt’s gregarious personality best: “There was no twilight and evening star for him,” White wrote. “He plunged headlong snorting into the breakers of the tide that swept him to another bourne, full armed breasting the waves, a strong swimmer undaunted.”37

As expected, Roosevelt assured both visitors that of course he cared a great deal about the fate of Florida’s brown pelican, egrets, ibises, and roseate spoonbills. He always had, since childhood. He had, in fact, recently read Chapman’s Bird Studies with a Camera and loved the vivid chapter on Pelican Island. Chapman and Dutcher couldn’t have had a more receptive audience that March afternoon in Washington.

The American Ornithologists Union had been trying to purchase Pelican Island outright from the federal government for three years, to no avail. That winter, members of the AOU finally had a constructive meeting with William A. Richards, the Department of the Interior’s new General Land Office (GLO) commissioner.38 Dutcher, acting as chair of the AOU’s committee on bird protection, along with Frank Bond, explained their quandary to Richards (a nononsense former governor of Wyoming). For years AOU had demanded that Pelican Island be surveyed—a prerequisite for placing a purchase bid on it. Now, with the official 1902 survey about to be filed, AOU felt boxed in. Legally, homesteaders’ applications had to be given preference when GLO land was sold. With homestead filings imminent, the AOU’s application would be shunned or given a low priority. And that meant the brown pelicans might not survive as a species on the Atlantic coast.

A hunter and conservationist himself, Richards wanted to help AOU, and he summoned Charles L. DuBois, his chief of the Public Surveys Division, into the meeting. Was there an ingenious way to circumvent the homesteaders-first provision? DuBois, a jurist who always dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, at first said no. But he offered Dutcher and Bond one long-shot alternative. President Roosevelt could make Pelican Island a bird refuge by issuing an Executive Order. Worried that a firestorm would ensue if the U.S. Department of the Interior seemed to be in collusion with AOU, DuBois instead suggested pushing the Executive Order through the USDA, where it would go virtually unnoticed in the Biological Survey Division headed by Dr. C. Hart Merriam.

Now that the AOU had a credible, legal way to protect Pelican Island, Dutcher wrote to Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson asking that a federal bird reservation be created. A stamp on the top corner shows that the secretary received it on February 27. Immediately using Frank M. Chapman as his conduit, Dutcher pushed for a meeting with the president about Pelican Island. Time was of the essence. With minimal difficulty Chapman procured a White House meeting that March.39

After listening attentively to their description of Pelican Island’s quandary, and sickened by the update on the plumers’ slaughter for millinery ornaments, Roosevelt asked, “Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?” The answer was a decided “No” the island, after all, was federal property. “Very well then,” Roosevelt said with marvelous quickness. “I So Declare It.”40

For the first time in history the U.S. government had set aside hallowed, timeless land for what became the first unit of the present U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Refuge System. History teaches that a zeitgeist sometimes develops around a fountainhead figure, that sometimes a transforming agent—in this case President Theodore Roosevelt—serves as an uplifting impetus for a new wave of collective thinking. Building on a growing ardor