Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Plume hunters were shooting the birds off this island for the hat trade. Paul Kroegel, a German immigrant boat builder who lived across the water and watched it happen, took to standing guard with a shotgun, and the campaign he became part of reached the president. Roosevelt signed the island into protection and Kroegel was made its first warden. Everything in the national refuge system, more than five hundred and fifty units of it, began here. The island itself has been shrinking: 5.5 acres in 1970, about three acres now, lost to erosion and rising water. The refuge around it runs to more than 5,400 acres of wetland and upland along the Indian River Lagoon. It was made a National Historic Landmark in 1963, a wilderness area in 1970, and a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1993. The Centennial Trail is a three-quarter-mile path ending in a boardwalk and observation tower, and that boardwalk carries 569 planks, one for every refuge