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was the second unit of what became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge System (whose stated mission was to “work with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitat for the continuing benefit of the American people”). Because nobody lived on the barrier islands—these islands were isolated sixteen miles from Venice, Louisiana, with treacherous Gulf waters in between—most Americans had never heard of the sandy breeding ground where pelicans and herons in the hundreds populated the beach. But plumers in Mississippi and Louisiana had. Regularly gangs made “hits” on nesting wading birds and seabirds.49

This changed after Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” of October. Within three or four months “Area Closed” signs were posted all over the new federal refuge. A full-time warden was hired. And in October, the police in Saint Louis had discovered a new investigatory method—fingerprinting. Perhaps, Roosevelt pondered, this new technique could be used against plumer gangs, who were then operating like pirates; three or four months of being locked up and smelling the dungeon stone, the president believed, would quickly turn them into preservationists. “Wreckers are no longer respectable, and plume-hunters and eggers are sinking to the same level,” Roosevelt wrote, with regard to Breton Island. “The illegal business of killing breeding birds, of leaving nestlings to starve wholesale, and of general ruthless extermination, more and more tends to attract men of the same moral category as those who sell whiskey to Indians and combine the running of ‘blind pigs’ with highway robbery and murder for hire.”50

There was nothing lush or exotic about Breton Island, which had been created from remnants of the Mississippi River’s Saint Bernard delta. To some sailors the island was just a long sandbar of broken shells, sargasso weed, and wind-twisted pine boles. Sometimes, though, with the sunset in sharp shades of bright red-orange, the island could look more enticing than a beach at Acapulco. A wide variety of birds crossed and recrossed the island, barely flapping a wing but just gliding in rhythm with the gulf waters. It was a soothing spot. The Tropic of Cancer vegetation included black mangrove and wax myrtle, both propagated by sprouting up tubers. To President Roosevelt’s way of thinking, he had created a bird reservation at the “mouth of the Mississippi” where his beloved pelicans could prosper. It was also a prime place where herons and terns built nests, dived for fish, and hunted for purplish shrimp. All said, thirty-three species of birds—wintering waterfowl, wading birds, secretive marsh birds, and various shorebirds—lived on the island. When the birds were in full plumage Breton Island was quite a sight.

Just as Roosevelt had hired Paul Kroegel to be the warden of Pelican Island, along the Mississippi-Louisiana barrier islands he now employed Captain William Sprinkle, with funds from the USDA and the AOU-Audubon endowment. Born and bred along the Gulf Coast, Sprinkle was a fine fisherman and shrimper and a professional wildlife protector. Later in life Roosevelt met him and declared that he “knows the sea-fowl” and the island where they “breed and dwell.” Sprinkle spent so much time sailing around the Gulf islands that when he returned to the mainland near Biloxi, where he lived, there usually was a quarter inch of dust on the divan. Sprinkle marveled at the iridescence of the Mississippi birds and their musical harmonies. To Roosevelt, “a fearless man” like Sprinkle, who appreciated laughing gulls and skimmers, was worth ten times an Agriculture Department bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., trying to make policy out of paper.

This fisherman-cum-warden with his motorized skiff took to his law enforcement job promptly with a warm feeling for nature in the Gulf. No longer did he eat the green herons’ pale-blue eggs; he was tasked with overseeing their hatching. Plumers, in fact, rued the day that Sprinkle had been given the warden’s badge. “The Biological Survey does its best with its limited means; the