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sister died during childbirth. His distraught father, Gottlob, took Paul and his two-year-old brother, Arthur, and immigrated to the United States the next year. They endured a brutal twelve-day voyage aboard the freighter S.S. Canada across the temptuous Atlantic. Arriving in New York, the Kroegels were deloused and given clean clothes. Paul was immediately homesick for Andersen’s storks: all of the tenement roofs in New York were populated by rat nests. After about four years on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, working in the meat business and as a jack-of-all-trades, Gottlob packed up his boys once again and first moved to Chicago and then eventually settle in Florida under the Homestead Act. Gottlob realized that Florida was his best chance of pursuing his idea of the American dream and providing a fine, healthy life for his boys.9 Lured by stories of eternal sunshine and citrus groves finer than those along the Nile River, Gottlob became a pioneer and homesteaded with Paul in the low-lying central coast of Florida between the Saint Sebastian and Indian rivers (today it is known as Indian River County).*10 After a brief stay in Fernandina, Florida, Gottlob bought a small skiff to sail the 200 miles of the Saint Johns River. But, encountering a headwind, he and Paul rowed most of the way. They had their boat and supplies hauled six miles on a mule-drawn tram to the shores of the Indian River. From there, they sailed another sixty-five miles south until they came upon a high promontory along the shoreline and decided to stay. They built a palm frond home on top of Barker’s Bluff, an old Ais Indian mound looking across the lagoon at Pelican Island. (Later that year a summer gale blew the house away, so they constructed a sturdier New England–style cottage, less vulnerable to tropical storms.)

When the Kroegels arrived in 1881, Florida was, as the novelist Wallace Stegner once wrote, a violent dreamland of “six-shooter freedom and orange-grove bliss,” a forlorn place where the soil was so luxuriant everything grew wild and the trees didn’t drop their leaves in winter.11 The Indian River region could be bleak, intimidating, and even lethal. But the lure of sunshine meant that every year more and more homesteaders arrived, using machetes to cut away palm sabal and crazy weeds to plant crops. Clearly there was something miraculous about Florida soil if—and only if—you could survive the coral snakes, diamondbacks, mosquito hordes, tropical storms, stark loneliness, and occasional frosts. Basically Florida in 1881 was like the Wild West—a frontier wilderness. Most villages like Sebastian didn’t even have a wooden water tank or a one-room schoolhouse to call their own.

By the time Paul Kroegel was a teenager, his nickname around Sebastian was “Pelican Watcher.” Just above the tide line of Pelican Island, he enjoyed watching these comical birds cavort with one another.12 (The brown pelicans reportedly did not share Pelican Island with other species from about 1882 to about 1939.) Protecting pelicans became part of his daily routine in Sebastian. Flocks of brown pelicans, in perfect formation, continually flew over his lookout home, making a steady stream of designs in the sky. Creatures of habit, brown pelicans returned to their favorite rookeries, like Pelican Island, every spring and winter to roost and lived year-round along the central coast, which overlapped the subtropical Caribbean zone and the temperate Carolinian zone. Their presence symbolized the oasis that was the Indian River Lagoon. Birds of all kinds, in fact, including man-of-wars with a wingspan of seven and a half feet, were often in migratory flux around his lagoon. There were white ibis, black-crowned night herons, and great blue herons. Sometimes the sky was so blotted with turbulent streams of wading birds that the flocks appeared like a high dome above the crystal blue lagoon. (The Indian River Lagoon was described by several early explorers and settlers as being crystal-clear and blue.) A celebrated founder of the National Association of Audubon Societies,