On March 14, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order setting aside Pelican Island, Florida, as the very first national wildlife refuge. Today, it remains an essential breeding ground for migratory waterfowl—and one of 561 wildlife refuges overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Daniel M. Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, recently discussed what Pelican Island is like today.

When a stray Rufous Hummingbird from the West came to the Museum in early December, no one thought she’d stay through snow, wind, and below-freezing nights—let alone until spring.

Still in the bushes on the equinox, this “vagrant,” the official term for migrators outside their range, is the first stray hummingbird in recent memory to overwinter in New York. En route to her wintering grounds in Mexico, she likely miscalculated the angle of her flight path south, landing her in the Museum’s shrubs outside the 81st Street entrance.

Central Park hosts great birds in every season, but springtime offers the most dazzling avian sights and sounds as migrants from the tropics return to their breeding grounds in the north. The Museum’s series of morning and lunchtime bird walks, each led by an expert, begin in early April and are scheduled to coincide with this migration, as warblers, vireos, tanagers, flycatchers, grosbeaks, thrushes, and others make their way to their summer homes.

Ornithologists generally discover new species by collecting them in the wild. But early in the 20th century, Museum ornithologist James P. Chapin found one on a hat.

In 1913, Chapin, while serving as an assistant to German taxidermist and photographer Herbert Lang on what would become known as the Lang-Chapin Expedition to the Belgian Congo, came upon a native of the Ituri forest wearing a headdress with a distinctive feather. To the young naturalist, it suggested a pheasant or peacock, a strange possibility since these birds were native to Asia. Curious, he took it.

Earlier this week, a crowd gathered around the shrubbery at the Museum’s 81st Street entrance.

They were looking for a Western hummingbird that found its way to the Museum grounds. Noah Burg of the Museum’s Education Department first spotted the stray on Wednesday, though it may have been there for several days.