Conference Between Biological Survey Chiefs

Biological Survey chief Ira N. Gabrielson (1889-1977) (left) confers with his predecessor, Paul Redington (1878-1942) at Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in 1937, as part of a Congressional tour of the 264-mile refuge straddling the Mississippi River shorelines of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Though political intrigue and bureaucratic infighting was not unknown in the early days of the National Wildlife Refuge System, resource management in the embryonic era of America’s first refuges was largely collegial, due perhaps in part to the fewer numbers of prominent conservationists guiding the evolution of the Nation’s Federal refuges. The pair of chiefs shared two decades’ worth of wildlife management experience as agency director. Gabrielson, who headed the Biological Survey from 1935 to 1946 during most of the New Deal administration of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, credited Redington, who served in the same post under Republican President Herbert Hoover, with setting the stage for the growth of the refuge system during the 1930’s. It was under Redington that Congress passed the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929, which established a coordinated system of Federal waterfowl refuges, which heretofore had been a somewhat disjointed collection of individual units first created by President Theodore Roosevelt as opportunities arose to designate areas of particular value to certain species of wildlife.