"But the birds weren't flitting through trees. They had been killed and their feathers had been painstakingly positioned on the three-fourths of the 700 women's hats he saw," wrote journalist Herbert Job in 1903 - the year the United States became the first nation to set aside land to conserve habitat for wildlife.
The story illustrates how a fleeting fashion - in this case a desire among increasingly affluent 19th-century women to wear the ostentatious plumage of rare birds - led to the founding of America's system of wildlife refuge, now covering 95 million acres in 540 units. This system is celebrated in the exhibit "America's Wildest Places," on display at the Utah Museum of Natural History until May 26.
"These are great places to see these birds and animals, but there's also all this conservation going on," said Becky Menlove, the museum's exhibits manager. Visitation at the refuges is around 40 million a year, and every major city is within an hour's drive of a refuge.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Smithsonian Institution assembled the exhibit for the 2003 centennial of the system, initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt's executive order to establish a seminal refuge at Pelican Island to "preserve breeding grounds for native birds."
The exhibit features video, blown-up photographs from a representative sampling of the nation's refuges, including Pelican and the National Elk Refuge outside Jackson, Wyo., and some 20 mounted specimens, including a young grizzly bear and a wolf on loan from Brigham Young University's Monte Bean Life Sciences Museum.
J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota, National Elk Refuge, Alaska's vast Kenai Wildlife Refuge and Sevilleta in New Mexico are also featured. Not included are Utah's three refuges: Bear River, Ouray and Fish Springs.
Game-bird conservation was the impetus for the creation of Utah's first refuge in 1928 at the Bear River delta on the Great Salt Lake, where farmers' water diversions dried up thousands of acres of wetland crucial to the survival of migratory waterfowl.
While hunting is allowed on many refuges, the system got its start in response to the excesses of market hunting of waterfowl, whose feathers had become coveted accessories, called aigrettes, on women's apparel and military uniforms. Plume traders especially valued heron feathers. A single auction house in 1902 sold 1,608 packages, representing the feathers from nearly 200,000 herons killed at their nests, Job reported.
By 1900, hunters were selling plumage for $32 an ounce, double the price the gold. Pelicans, egrets and herons were on the verge of extinction by the time Roosevelt acted by setting aside the 3-acre Pelican Island on March 14, 1903 - 15 years before these birds would win broad protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Some 5,000 pairs of pelicans once nested there; now there are fewer than 100. The refuge has expanded to include 5,000 acres of surrounding lagoon on Florida's southern Atlantic coast to protect a total of 30 bird species.
bmaffly@sltrib.com
America's Wildest Places
An exhibit celebrating the centennial of the nation's wildlife-refuge system is at the Utah Museum of Natural History on the University of Utah campus until May 26. More information: www.umnh.utah.edu/.
