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political authority and his status as a war hero to lash out at what John Burroughs (in Signs and Seasons) called “bird highwaymen.” After the Hallock Bill, these millinary plunderers’ destruction, both naturalists believed, had to end in criminal suits. (Unfortunately for Roosevelt and the conservation movement, the modern-day concept of class-action suits against despoilers of the environment did not come to fruition until the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 in 1938.) As far back as 1886, with venom pouring from his pen, Burroughs had gone after the “bird highwaymen” and even science-minded men who overcollected. “The professional nest-robber and skin-collector should be put down,” Burroughs wrote, using the kind of fierce language Roosevelt admired, “either by legislation or with dogs and shotguns.”76

Burroughs was first and foremost a bird lover. He knew how to tread quietly in a woods or marsh so as not to scare the birds away. Like Roosevelt, he used his ears as much as his eyes. He looked for particularly rare species at dawn and dusk, when they were most active. Seldom did he disturb birds that were courting or nesting. He trained himself to detect small movements in the woods, usually by looking out of the corner of his eyes. Sometimes Burroughs would make a squeaking or pishing noise to attract curious songbirds. This seemed to work like a charm with chickadees and kinglets. Burroughs marveled that there were 5 billion wild birds in North America. But extinctions of species like the Labrador duck and the great auk were far too frequent. Every town, Burroughs believed, needed an Audubon Society so that birdsong could seep into people’s consciousness.

V

Among all these birds’ rights activists who gravitated around Burroughs, Grinnell, and Roosevelt, none were as politically effective at reducing market hunting as William Dutcher of New York. Dutcher—who had a grayish beard like Andrew Carnegie’s, wore rimless spectacles, and kept his hair neatly parted—dedicated thirty years of his life to the “citizen bird” movement. At first glance, Dutcher’s face suggested a buttoned-down “old chap,” a man dutiful about fulfilling obligations and the handshake agreements like those made in the days before the telegraph. Born in New Jersey during the Mexican War, Dutcher was raised to become an apprentice Wall Street banker. But, for whatever reasons, his health faltered in the city. Coughing fits, headaches, bronchitis, sinusitis, although not seriously debilitating, flared up chronically, making him miserable. Repairing to a farm near Springfield, Massachusetts, filling his lungs with fresh air, and hiking through the unfenced woods along the Connecticut River revived Dutcher, and he had an inspiration. Nature, he came to believe, had curative powers more potent than the homeopathic nostrums being peddled in his local pharmacy.

Returning to New York to earn a living, and to make something of himself, Dutcher joined the Brooklyn Life Insurance Company, where he worked his way up from cashier to secretary to top agent. Not unhandsome or overly sophisticated, Dutcher was what the sociologist William H. Whyte, in the 1950s, would call an “organization man,” dressed for success and unflaggingly loyal to his boss. Living in Manhattan, however, once again took a toll on his precarious health. All the nagging symptoms he had experienced as a teenager came back, causing him to feel like a voodoo doll being pinpricked by every allergen known to mankind. Relief came only when he escaped for weekend trips to hunt snipes, ducks, and geese. One afternoon at Shinnecock Bay on Long Island he shot a beautiful Wilson’s plover. Intrigued by this shorebird’s white forehead and distinctive eye stripe, he decided to have the taxidermist John Bell—Audubon’s student, who had taught Theodore Roosevelt as a boy—mount it. Bell’s museum-quality product, he figured, would bring some much-needed flair to his rather drab office at the insurance company.

From that single Wilson’s plover grew one of the best bird collections in New York. Dutcher learned