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that this plover was named after the pioneering ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who shot a specimen in Cape May, New Jersey in 1813. Dutcher may perhaps have thought that someday a bird would be named after him. Certainly he could have imagined few greater honors. If he opened up new windows in ornithology he was sure others would follow him. With the zeal of a smitten hobbyist, Dutcher became infatuated with all the birds of Long Island. That was his niche as a collector. Every weekend, even in winter, he could be found shooting double-crested cormorants, American golden plovers, and harlequin ducks with his .410-gauge along the North Shore and even at the far-off tip of the island.77 With great steadiness, he would carefully skin his birds by first making an incision in the breast and belly. Then he would peel the skin off the carcass and remove the meat, replacing it with cotton. An arsenic paste was then rubbed all over the feathers to deter insects while the specimen was drying. Writing out insurance policies by day, and reading John Burroughs by night, and applying the arsenic on weekends, Dutcher, the taxidermist-ornithologist, stepped out of the corporate shadows to become the world’s authority on Long Island birds, with his only real rival being Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay.

In September 1883, after a summer of collecting specimens on Long Island, Dutcher was elected an associate member of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), the new nonprofit organization promoting avian rights. (He would also participate in the first Audubon movement in 1886.) From his cluttered office at 51 Liberty Street—when he wasn’t wrestling with insurance claims—Dutcher carefully crafted position papers for the AOU to disseminate and squeezed annual dues from new members. Refusing to let the AOU become ineffectual, he was fervent about stopping the slaughter of birds. He was no martyr, but it didn’t take his colleagues at AOU long to realize that he was a workhorse.

Undoubtedly the most tireless member of AOU’s Protection of North American Birds Committee, Dutcher evolved into a strong conservationist, determined to win the battle, never concealing his emotions, drafting model laws to protect nongame birds, and coordinating activities between the various state Audubon societies that were springing up along the Atlantic coast. Determined to thwart the plumers, Dutcher, with the financial assistance of Abbot H. Thayer, created a fund to protect colonies of U.S. seabirds from Maine to Florida. The Thayer Fund, as it was called, had the distinction of being the first conservation effort solely dedicated to saving herons, egrets, pelicans, and hundreds of other sea-birds from extinction. A simple philanthropic rule of thumb for William Dutcher was, “If John James Audubon painted it, the Thayer Fund would protect it.”

What made Dutcher an effective lobbyist was his single-minded devotion to his winged clients. Like a determined town crier, he was impossible to silence. He saw setbacks not as defeats, but only as retrenchments. Always, at any hour or minute, when it came to birds’ rights he had skin in the game. (In other words, he was a fanatic.) As much as he admired Burroughs’s poetic musing about hermit thrushes and the common sparrow, birds’ rights, he believed, would be won through the legislative process. Laws were elastic, and he planned to take full advantage of that fact. If the Boone and Crockett Club could lobby successfully for timberland reserves and for the protection of Yellowstone Park, then there was no reason he couldn’t achieve model bird laws. Cordial, determined, and always armed with data, Dutcher headed to Albany in an effort to convince the New York legislature that the gulls and terns of the Empire State deserved protection. With Governor Roosevelt and John Burroughs cheering him on, Dutcher persuaded the legislators to approve the assigning of a few wardens all around Long Island to safeguard seabirds’ breeding grounds. If Albany agreed to this conservation plan, the AOU, through the Thayer Fund, would foot