Jay Norwood 'Ding' Darling — the newspaper cartoonist who invented the Duck Stamp, ran the nation's wildlife service, and personally saved this island — the whole reason there's a refuge here at all.
I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and you keep hearing about this refuge called 'Ding Darling,' so let me tell you about the man — because it's one of the finest 'one person made a difference' stories in all of American conservation, and it started with a pen.
His name was Jay Norwood Darling, but everybody knew him by the name he signed his cartoons with — 'Ding.' Because that's what he was: a newspaper editorial cartoonist, one of the very best there ever was, good enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons not once but twice. But Ding Darling loved the outdoors, the ducks and marshes of his Iowa boyhood, and he watched with a breaking heart as America drained its wetlands and shot out its waterfowl, and he started drawing about it — cartoon after cartoon hammering on the same point: we are destroying our wild things, and we have to stop.
And here's what lifts his story above all the others: he didn't just draw about it — he was handed the power to actually do something, and he used it brilliantly. In the nineteen-thirties President Roosevelt put this cartoonist in charge of the nation's wildlife agency, the outfit that would grow into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And Ding Darling, in barely a year and a half, changed everything. He came up with an idea so simple it was genius: make every duck hunter buy a special federal stamp each year, and pour all that money straight into buying and protecting wetlands. The Duck Stamp. And who drew the very first one, in 1934? He did — a cartoonist's drawing of two mallards dropping into a marsh, a dollar apiece. That program has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and protected millions of acres of wild wetland, and it's still going strong today. He used a hunter's own dollar to save the ducks.
And then there's this island. When developers moved to buy up and carve up the wild wetlands of Sanibel, it was Ding Darling — who wintered here and loved it — who fought them, and lobbied all the way up to President Truman, and got this land set aside as a refuge in 1945. He didn't live to see it named for him; that came a few years after he died. But make no mistake, standing here: the spoonbills, the mangroves, this whole wild sanctuary you're driving through — they exist because one stubborn cartoonist with a pen and a cause would not let them be paved over. One person. That's the whole story of this place. Roll on, and tip your hat to old Ding.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided · Public domain
