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Gallagher Key and Bull Key) as a “preserve and breeding ground for native birds,” he considered it his last one in Florida, the pièce de résistance there.83 Surrounded by brackish waters, the bottom around Island Bay offered fine examples of such rich Florida marine vegetation as widgeon grass and shoal grass. Besides the more commonplace shorebirds, gulls, and terns, the rare little blue herons often congregated on Island Bay. For centuries the Calusa Indians lived on these islets, and for good reason: an abundance of shellfish was available. West Indian manatees also congregated in the warm waters around Island Bay where vegetation was plentiful.84 Fittingly, Roosevelt’s last bird reservation in Florida had the additional value of protecting manatees from human encroachment.

During this period Roosevelt, hoping to guide public opinion, supported William Dutcher’s request to the AOU and—following the lead of Pennsylvania and Delaware—appointed state ornithologists in Florida. A concerted effort was also under way for state Audubon societies to affiliate with the SPCA and other humane organizations. Some states, as a result of Dutcher’s lobbying, outlawed the shooting of birds on Sundays. The AOU chastised Arizona, Hawaii, Oregon, Michigan, and other states with a high concentration of birds for not adopting this prohibition, which gave “absolute rest to bird life for the one day per week.”85

With Roosevelt’s support, Dutcher also wrote to the U.S. Navy, asking it to protect the rookeries of the Philippines, and of the Midway atolls, which were owned by the United States and were a station of the Pacific Cable Company. Roosevelt had already sent U.S. Marines to Midway to protect the albatross, and he was ready to do the same for terns in the Dry Tortugas. “I am informed that the Japanese people have been in the habit of visiting these islands for the purpose of killing birds for their plumage,” Dutcher wrote to T.R.’s secretary of the navy, William Moody, about Midway. “It is known that during the past few years enormous numbers of seabirds have been killed by the Japanese and have been shipped to the Paris, London, and New York markets for millinery ornaments; among these birds were great numbers of a very beautiful form of the tern family known as Gygis alba. Our Society is under many obligations to your Department for your hearty cooperation in our work for the preservation of sea-birds, the latest and one of the most notable instances being your order of April 24 [1903] in re the birds on the Dry Tortugas, Florida.”86

Once the Dry Tortugas became a federal bird reservation in 1908, Roosevelt personally asked the Secretary of the Navy to make sure that the Tortugas group, including every key and shoal, would never be disturbed. No traps, torpedoes, maneuvers, or mock invasions would be allowed to turn this paradise into an ash heap. Roosevelt wanted the Tortugas group astir with birds flying along the ocean’s edge. A special warden, W. R. Burton, was assigned to Bird Key by AOU. Burton’s job was to report to Dutcher anybody encroaching on the Tortugas bird sanctuaries. Dutcher in turn would report the matter to Roosevelt, who would inform the secretary of the navy. If any U.S. sailors dared touch a sooty tern’s egg or nest, they would be severely punished. Herbert Job went to the naval station at Key West and spoke personally with the coolheaded Commander George Bicknell. Bicknell understood what the president wanted and expressed to AOU the Navy Department’s deep regret that some shortsighted Florida residents seemed “determined to make of their beautiful state a lifelong, treeless desert as fast as they possibly can.”87

Roosevelt scoffed at the notion, expressed by people in Florida’s chambers of commerce, that the White House’s approval of AOU-Audubon wardens in Florida smacked of socialism. Collective action on behalf of “citizen bird” was a good thing, he said. “Every civilized government which contains the least possibility of progress, or in which life would be supportable, is administered on a system of mixed