To dare mighty things: Theodore Roosevelt's intense passion for politics and the natural world helped shape America's national parks.(Cover story)

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As a rancher in North Dakota in the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt described the song of the meadowlark as "a cadence of wild sadness." Years later on a Louisiana hunting trip, he marveled at the size and plumage of the nearly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. In 1907, he was the last trained ornithologist to observe passenger pigeons in the wild.

America's 26th president was a conservation-minded cowboy in spectacles and a three-piece suit, a hunter who championed hunting regulations, an urban politician who found ways to connect to the natural world. He loved birds, open spaces, and back-busting ranch work. And he carved a path for protection of our national parks, establishing himself as one of the most innovative conservationists in history.

In a 1905 speech to a Chicago audience, his relentless drive shines through: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat."

The image of Roosevelt as a robust political figure and outdoorsman contradicts his sickly childhood, when bronchial asthma left his body frail and sickly. "Teedie," as he was called by his aristocratic New York family, was the son of a Dutch Yankee and a Southern belle. Despite his urban surroundings, he loved nature and revered animals. In fact, when Roosevelt's mother sent the seven-year-old boy to buy strawberries at a bustling Broadway market, he came upon a sight that would have appalled or saddened most children a dead seal. But Roosevelt was fascinated and returned the next day with a pocket ruler to measure the carcass and ask where the animal was killed.…