Theodore Roosevelt at Breton NWR

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) never made it to Florida’s Pelican Island – America’s first national wildlife refuge, which Roosevelt himself had established with a stroke of his pen in 1903, setting in motion the creation of what would become the world’s largest system of public lands managed for the benefit of wildlife. Six years after leaving the Presidency, however, Roosevelt did set foot on America’s second national wildlife – Breton National Wildlife Refuge, a string of islands in the Chandeleur chain in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, designated a refuge in 1904. By 1915, when Roosevelt visited, the region was still a mixture of private and state lands, and the embryonic Federal refuge; some of the low-lying Gulf of Mexico islets and sandbars since have disappeared entirely, victims of shifting tides and tropical storms. As recorded in one of his autobiographies, “A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open,” Roosevelt tramped the shorelines and bird rookeries of Breton refuge, watched a flight of black skimmers, and contemplated the world, as he approached the final four years of his life, from this solitary perch here on Bird Island.