Our many-sided President has a side to his nature of which the public
has heard but little, and which, in view of his recent criticism of
what he calls the nature fakirs, is of especial interest and
importance. I refer to his keenness and enthusiasm as a student of
animal life, and his extraordinary powers of observation. The charge
recently made against him that he is only a sportsman and has only a
sportsman's interest in nature is very wide of the mark. Why, I cannot
now recall that I have ever met a man with a keener and more
comprehensive interest in the wild life about us--an interest that is
at once scientific and thoroughly human. And by human I do not mean
anything akin to the sentimentalism that sicklies o'er so much of our
more recent natural history writing, and that inspires the founding of
hospitals for sick cats; but I mean his robust, manly love for all
open-air life, and his sympathetic insight into it. When I first read
his "Wilderness Hunter," many years ago, I was impressed by his rare
combination of the sportsman and the naturalist. When I accompanied
him on his trip to the Yellowstone Park in April, 1903, I got a fresh
impression of the extent of his natural history knowledge and of his
trained powers of observation. Nothing escaped him, from bears to
mice, from wild geese to chickadees, from elk to red squirrels; he
took it all in, and he took it in as only an alert, vigorous mind can
take it in. On that occasion I was able to help him identify only one
new bird, as I have related in the foregoing chapter. All the other
birds he recognized as quickly as I did.
During a recent half-day spent with the President at Sagamore Hill I
got a still more vivid impression of his keenness and quickness in all
natural history matters. The one passion of his life seemed natural
history, and the appearance of a new warbler in his woods--new in the
breeding season on Long Island--seemed an event that threw the affairs
of state and of the presidential succession quite into the background.
Indeed, he fairly bubbled over with delight at the thought of his new
birds and at the prospect of showing them to his visitors. He said to
my friend who accompanied me, John Lewis Childs, of Floral Park, a
former State Senator, that he could not talk politics then, he wanted
to talk and to hunt birds. And it was not long before he was as hot
on the trail of that new warbler as he had recently been on the trail
of some of the great trusts. Fancy a President of the United States
stalking rapidly across bushy fields to the woods, eager as a boy and
filled with the one idea of showing to his visitors the black-throated
green warbler! We were presently in the edge of the woods and standing
under a locust tree, where the President had several times seen and
heard his rare visitant. "That's his note now," he said, and we all
three recognized it at the same instant. It came from across a little
valley fifty yards farther in the woods. We were soon standing under
the tree in which the bird was singing, and presently had our glasses
upon him.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT'S HOME ON SAGAMORE HILL, SHOWING
ADDITION KNOWN AS THE TROPHY ROOM
From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
"There is no mistake about it, Mr. President," we both said; "it is
surely the black-throated green," and he laughed in glee. "I knew it
could be no other; there is no mistaking that song and those markings.
'Trees, trees, murmuring trees!' some one reports him as saying. Now
if we could only find the nest;" but we did not, though it was
doubtless not far off.
Our warblers, both in color and in song, are bewildering even to the
experienced ornithologist, but the President had mastered most of
them. Not long before he had written me from Washington that he had
just come in from walking with Mrs. Roosevelt about the White House
grounds looking up arriving warblers. "Most of the warblers were up in
the tops of the trees, and I could not get a good glimpse of them; but
there was one with chestnut cheeks, with bright yellow behind the
cheeks, and a yellow breast thickly streaked with black, which has
puzzled me. Doubtless it is a very common kind which has for the
moment slipped my memory. I saw the Blackburnian, the summer
yellowbird, and the black-throated green." The next day he wrote me
that he had identified the puzzling warbler; it was the Cape May.
There is a tradition among newspaper men in Washington that a Cape May
warbler once broke up a Cabinet meeting; maybe this was that identical
bird.
At luncheon he told us of some of his ornithological excursions in the
White House grounds, how people would stare at him as he stood gazing
up into the trees like one demented. "No doubt they thought me
insane." "Yes," said Mrs. Roosevelt, "and as I was always with him,
they no doubt thought I was the nurse that had him in charge."
In his "Pastimes of an American Hunter" he tells of the owls that in
June sometimes came after nightfall about the White House. "Sometimes
they flew noiselessly to and fro, and seemingly caught big insects on
the wing. At other times they would perch on the iron awning bars
directly overhead. Once one of them perched over one of the windows
and sat motionless, looking exactly like an owl of Pallas Athene."
He knew the vireos also, and had seen and heard the white-eyed at his
Virginia place, "Pine Knot," and he described its peculiar, emphatic
song. As I moved along with the thought of this bird in mind and its
snappy, incisive song, as I used to hear it in the old days near
Washington, I fancied I caught its note in a dense bushy place below
us. We paused to listen. "A catbird," said the President, and so we
all agreed. We saw and heard a chewink. "Out West the chewink calls
like a catbird," he observed. Continuing our walk, we skirted the edge
of an orchard. Here the President called our attention to a
high-hole's nest in a cavity of an old apple tree. He rapped on the
trunk of the tree that we might hear the smothered cry for food of the
young inside. A few days before he had found one of the half-fledged
young on the ground under the tree, and had managed to reach up and
drop it back into the nest. "What a boiling there was in there," he
said, "when the youngster dropped in!"
A cuckoo called in a tree overhead, the first I had heard this season.
I feared the cold spring had cut them off. "The yellow-billed,
undoubtedly," the President observed, and was confirmed by Mr. Childs.
I was not certain that I knew the call of the yellow-billed from that
of the black-billed. "We have them both," said the President, "but the
yellow-billed is the more common."
We continued our walk along a path that led down through a most
delightful wood to the bay. Everywhere the marks of the President's
axe were visible, as he had with his own hand thinned out and cleared
up a large section of the wood.
A few days previous he had seen some birds in a group of tulip-trees
near the edge of the woods facing the water; he thought they were
rose-breasted grosbeaks, but could not quite make them out. He had
hoped to find them there now, and we looked and listened for some
moments, but no birds appeared.
Then he led us to a little pond in the midst of the forest where the
night heron sometimes nested. A pair of them had nested there in a big
water maple the year before, but the crows had broken them up. As we
reached the spot the cry of the heron was heard over the tree-tops.
"That is its alarm note," said the President. I remarked that it was
much like the cry of the little green heron. "Yes, it is, but if we
wait here till the heron returns, and we are not discovered, you would
hear his other more characteristic call, a hoarse quawk."
Presently we moved on along another path through the woods toward the
house. A large, wide-spreading oak attracted my attention--a superb
tree.
"You see by the branching of that oak," said the President, "that when
it grew up this wood was an open field and maybe under the plough; it
is only in fields that oaks take that form." I knew it was true, but
my mind did not take in the fact when I first saw the tree. His mind
acts with wonderful swiftness and completeness, as I had abundant
proof that day.
[Illustration: A BIT OF WOODLAND ON THE SLOPE TOWARDS OYSTER
BAY
From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
As we walked along we discussed many questions, all bearing directly
or indirectly upon natural history. The conversation was perpetually
interrupted by some bird-note in the trees about us which we would
pause to identify--the President's ear, I thought, being the most
alert of the three. Continuing the talk, he dwelt upon the inaccuracy
of most persons' seeing, and upon the unreliability as natural history
of most of the stories told by guides and hunters. Sometimes writers
of repute were to be read with caution. He mentioned that excellent
hunting book of Colonel Dodge's, in which are described two species of
the puma, one in the West called the "mountain lion," very fierce and
dangerous; the other called in the East the "panther,"--a harmless and
cowardly animal. "Both the same species," said the President, "and
almost identical in disposition."
Nothing is harder than to convince a person that he has seen wrongly.
The other day a doctor accosted me in the street of one of our inland
towns to tell me of a strange bird he had seen; the bird was
blood-red all over and was in some low bushes by the roadside. Of
course I thought of our scarlet tanager, which was then just arriving.
No, he knew that bird with black wings and tail; this bird had no
black upon it, but every quill and feather was vivid scarlet. The
doctor was very positive, so I had to tell him we had no such bird in
our state. There was the summer redbird common in the Southern States,
but this place is much beyond its northern limit, and, besides, this
bird is not scarlet, but is of a dull red. Of course he had seen a
tanager, but in the shade of the bushes the black of the wings and
tail had escaped him.
This was simply a case of mis-seeing in an educated man; but in the
untrained minds of trappers and woodsmen generally there is an element
of the superstitious, and a love for the marvelous, which often
prevents them from seeing the wild life about them just as it is. They
possess the mythopoeic faculty, and they unconsciously give play to
it.
Thus our talk wandered as we wandered along the woods and field paths.
The President brought us back by the corner of a clover meadow where
he was sure a pair of red-shouldered starlings had a nest. He knew it
was an unlikely place for starlings to nest, as they breed in marshes
and along streams and in the low bushes on lake borders, but this pair
had always shown great uneasiness when he had approached this plot of
tall clover. As we drew near, the male starling appeared and uttered
his alarm note. The President struck out to look for the nest, and for
a time the Administration was indeed in clover, with the alarmed
black-bird circling above it and showing great agitation. For my
part, I hesitated on the edge of the clover patch, having a farmer's
dread of seeing fine grass trampled down. I suggested to the President
that he was injuring his hay crop; that the nest was undoubtedly there
or near there; so he came out of the tall grass, and, after looking
into the old tumbled-down barn--a regular early settler's barn, with
huge timbers hewn from forest trees--that stood near by, and which the
President said he preserved for its picturesqueness and its savor of
old times, as well as for a place to romp in with his dogs and
children, we made our way to the house.
The purple finch nested in the trees about the house, and the
President was greatly pleased that he was able to show us this bird
also.
[Illustration: A PATH IN THE WOODS LEADING TO COLD SPRING
HARBOR
From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
A few days previous to our visit the children had found a bird's nest
on the ground, in the grass, a few yards below the front of the house.
There were young birds in it, and as the President had seen the
grasshopper sparrow about there, he concluded the nest belonged to it.
We went down to investigate it, and found the young gone and two
addled eggs in the nest. When the President saw those eggs, he said:
"That is not the nest of the grasshopper sparrow, after all; those are
the eggs of the song sparrow, though the nest is more like that of the
vesper sparrow. The eggs of the grasshopper sparrow are much lighter
in color--almost white, with brown specks." For my part, I had quite
forgotten for the moment how the eggs of the little sparrow looked or
differed in color from those of the song sparrow. But the President
has so little to remember that he forgets none of these minor things!
His bird-lore and wood-lore seem as fresh as if just learned.
I asked him if he ever heard that rare piece of bird music, the flight
song of the oven-bird. "Yes," he replied, "we frequently hear it of an
evening, while we are sitting on the porch, right down there at the
corner of the woods." Now, this flight song of the oven-bird was
unknown to the older ornithologists, and Thoreau, with all his years
of patient and tireless watching of birds and plants, never identified
it; but the President had caught it quickly and easily, sitting on his
porch at Sagamore Hill. I believe I may take the credit of being the
first to identify and describe this song--back in the old "Wake Robin"
days.
In an inscription in a book the President had just given me he had
referred to himself as my pupil. Now I was to be his pupil. In dealing
with the birds I could keep pace with him pretty easily, and, maybe,
occasionally lead him; but when we came to consider big game and the
animal life of the globe, I was nowhere. His experience with the big
game has been very extensive, and his acquaintance with the literature
of the subject is far beyond my own; and he forgets nothing, while my
memory is a sieve. In his study he set before me a small bronze
elephant in action, made by the famous French sculptor Barye. He asked
me if I saw anything wrong with it. I looked it over carefully, and
was obliged to confess that, so far as I could see, it was all right.
Then he placed before me another, by a Japanese artist. Instantly I
saw what was wrong with the Frenchman's elephant. Its action was like
that of a horse or a cow, or any trotting animal--a hind and a front
foot on opposite sides moving together. The Japanese had caught the
real movement of the animal, which is that of a pacer--both legs on
the same side at a time. What different effects the two actions gave
the statuettes! The free swing of the Japanese elephant you at once
recognize as the real thing. The President laughed, and said he had
never seen any criticism of Barye's elephant on this ground, or any
allusion to his mistake; it was his own discovery. I was fairly beaten
at my own game of observation.
He then took down a copy of his "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail,"
and pointed out to me the mistakes the artist had made in some of his
drawings of big Western game.
"Do you see anything wrong in the head of the pronghorn?" he asked,
referring to the animal which the hunter is bringing in on the saddle
behind him. Again I had to confess that I could not. Then he showed me
the mounted head of a pronghorn over the mantel in one of his rooms,
and called my attention to the fact that the eye was close under the
root of the horn, whereas in the picture the artist had placed it
about two inches too low. And in the artist's picture of the
pronghorn, which heads Chapter IX, he had made the tail much too long,
as he had the tail of the elk on the opposite page.
I had heard of Mr. Roosevelt's attending a fair in Orange County,
while he was Governor, where a group of mounted deer were exhibited.
It seems the group had had rough usage, and one of the deer had lost
its tail and a new one had been supplied. No one had noticed anything
wrong with it till Mr. Roosevelt came along. "But the minute he
clapped his eyes on that group," says the exhibitor, "he called out,
'Here, Gunther, what do you mean by putting a white-tail deer's tail
on a black-tail deer?" Such closeness and accuracy of observation even
few naturalists can lay claim to. I mentioned the incident to him,
and he recalled it laughingly. He then took down a volume on the deer
family which he had himself had a share in writing, and pointed out
two mistakes in the naming of the pictures which had been overlooked.
The picture of the "white-tail in flight" was the black-tail of
Colorado, and the picture of the black-tail of Colorado showed the
black-tail of Columbia--the difference this time being seen in the
branching of the horns.
The President took us through his house and showed us his trophies of
the chase--bearskins of all sorts and sizes on the floors, panther and
lynx skins on the chairs, and elk heads and deer heads on the walls,
and one very large skin of the gray timber wolf. We examined the teeth
of the wolf, barely more than an inch long, and we all laughed at the
idea of its reaching the heart of a caribou through the breast by a
snap, or any number of snaps, as it has been reported to do. I doubt
if it could have reached the heart of a gobbler turkey in that way at
a single snap.
[Illustration: A YEARLING IN THE APPLE ORCHARD
From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
The President's interest in birds, and in natural history generally,
dates from his youth. While yet in his teens he published a list of
the birds of Franklin County, New York. He showed me a bird journal
which he kept in Egypt when he was a lad of fourteen, and a case of
three African plovers which he had set up at that time; and they were
well done.
Evidently one of his chief sources of pleasure at Sagamore Hill is the
companionship of the birds. He missed the bobolink, the seaside finch,
and the marsh wren, but his woods and grounds abounded in other
species. He knew and enjoyed not only all the more common birds, but
many rarer and shyer ones that few country people ever take note
of--such as the Maryland yellow-throat, the black and white creeper,
the yellow-breasted chat, the oven-bird, the prairie warbler, the
great crested flycatcher, the wood pewee, and the sharp-tailed finch.
He enjoyed the little owls, too. "It is a pity the little-eared owl is
called a screech owl. Its tremulous, quavering cry is not a screech at
all, and has an attraction of its own. These little owls come up to
the house after dark, and are fond of sitting on the elk's antlers
over the gable. When the moon is up, by choosing one's position, the
little owl appears in sharp outline against the bright disk, seated on
his many-tined perch."
A few days after my visit he wrote me that he had identified the
yellow-throated or Dominican warbler in his woods, the first he had
ever seen. I had to confess to him that I had never seen the bird. It
is very rare north of Maryland. The same letter records several
interesting little incidents in the wild life about him:
"The other night I took out the boys in rowboats for a camping-out
expedition. We camped on the beach under a low bluff near the grove
where a few years ago on a similar expedition we saw a red fox. This
time two young foxes, evidently this year's cubs, came around the camp
half a dozen times during the night, coming up within ten yards of the
fire to pick up scraps and seeming to be very little bothered by our
presence. Yesterday on the tennis ground I found a mole shrew. He was
near the side lines first. I picked him up in my handkerchief, for he
bit my hand, and after we had all looked at him I let him go; but in a
few minutes he came back and deliberately crossed the tennis grounds
by the net. As he ran over the level floor of the court, his motion
reminded all of us of the motion of those mechanical mice that run
around on wheels when wound up. A chipmunk that lives near the tennis
court continually crosses it when the game is in progress. He has done
it two or three times this year, and either he or his predecessor has
had the same habit for several years. I am really puzzled to know why
he should go across this perfectly bare surface, with the players
jumping about on it, when he is not frightened and has no reason that
I can see for going. Apparently he grows accustomed to the players and
moves about among them as he would move about, for instance, among a
herd of cattle."
The President is a born nature-lover, and he has what does not always
go with this passion--remarkable powers of observation. He sees
quickly and surely, not less so with the corporeal eye than with the
mental. His exceptional vitality, his awareness all around, gives the
clue to his powers of seeing. The chief qualification of a born
observer is an alert, sensitive, objective type of mind, and this
Roosevelt has in a preeminent degree.
You may know the true observer, not by the big things he sees, but by
the little things; and then not by the things he sees with effort and
premeditation, but by his effortless, unpremeditated seeing--the
quick, spontaneous action of his mind in the presence of natural
objects. Everybody sees the big things, and anybody can go out with
note-book and opera-glass and make a dead set at the birds, or can go
into the northern forests and interview guides and trappers and
Indians, and stare in at the door of the "school of the woods." None
of these things evince powers of observation; they only evince
industry and intention. In fact, born observers are about as rare as
born poets. Plenty of men can see straight and report straight what
they see; but the men who see what others miss, who see quickly and
surely, who have the detective eye, like Sherlock Holmes, who "get the
drop," so to speak, on every object, who see minutely and who see
whole, are rare indeed.
President Roosevelt comes as near fulfilling this ideal as any man I
have known. His mind moves with wonderful celerity, and yet as an
observer he is very cautious, jumps to no hasty conclusions.
He had written me, toward the end of May, that while at Pine Knot in
Virginia he had seen a small flock of passenger pigeons. As I had been
following up the reports of wild pigeons from various parts of our
own state during the past two or three years, this statement of the
President's made me prick up my ears. In my reply I said, "I hope you
are sure about those pigeons," and I told him of my interest in the
subject, and also how all reports of pigeons in the East had been
discredited by a man in Michigan who was writing a book on the
subject. This made him prick up his ears, and he replied that while he
felt very certain he had seen a small band of the old wild pigeons,
yet he might have been deceived; the eye sometimes plays one tricks.
He said that in his old ranch days he and a cowboy companion thought
one day that they had discovered a colony of _black_ prairie dogs,
thanks entirely to the peculiar angle at which the light struck them.
He said that while he was President he did not want to make any
statement, even about pigeons, for the truth of which he did not have
good evidence. He would have the matter looked into by a friend at
Pine Knot upon whom he could depend. He did so, and convinced himself
and me also that he had really seen wild pigeons. I had the pleasure
of telling him that in the same mail with his letter came the news to
me of a large flock of wild pigeons having been seen near the
Beaverkill in Sullivan County, New York. While he was verifying his
observation I was in Sullivan County verifying this report. I saw and
questioned persons who had seen the pigeons, and I came away fully
convinced that a flock of probably a thousand birds had been seen
there late in the afternoon of May 23. "You need have no doubt about
it," said the most competent witness, an old farmer. "I lived here
when the pigeons nested here in countless numbers forty years ago. I
know pigeons as I know folks, and these were pigeons."
[Illustration: HALLWAY, SAGAMORE HILL
From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
I mention this incident of the pigeons because I know that the fact
that they have been lately seen in considerable numbers will be good
news to a large number of readers.
The President's nature-love is deep and abiding. Not every bird
student succeeds in making the birds a part of his life. Not till you
have long and sympathetic intercourse with them, in fact, not till you
have loved them for their own sake, do they enter into and become a
part of your life. I could quote many passages from President
Roosevelt's books which show how he has felt and loved the birds, and
how discriminating his ear is with regard to their songs. Here is
one:--
"The meadow-lark is a singer of a higher order [than the plains
skylark], deserving to rank with the best. Its song has length,
variety, power, and rich melody, and there is in it sometimes a
cadence of wild sadness inexpressibly touching. Yet I cannot say that
either song would appeal to others as it appeals to me; for to me it
comes forever laden with a hundred memories and associations--with the
sight of dim hills reddening in the dawn, with the breath of cool
morning winds blowing across lonely plains, with the scent of flowers
on the sunlit prairie, with the motion of fiery horses, with all the
strong thrill of eager and buoyant life. I doubt if any man can judge
dispassionately the bird-songs of his own country; he cannot
disassociate them from the sights and sounds of the land that is so
dear to him."
Here is another, touching upon some European song-birds as compared
with some of our own: "No one can help liking the lark; it is such a
brave, honest, cheery bird, and moreover its song is uttered in the
air, and is very long-sustained. But it is by no means a musician of
the first rank. The nightingale is a performer of a very different and
far higher order; yet though it is indeed a notable and admirable
singer, it is an exaggeration to call it unequaled. In melody, and
above all in that finer, higher melody where the chords vibrate with
the touch of eternal sorrow, it cannot rank with such singers as the
wood-thrush and the hermit-thrush. The serene ethereal beauty of the
hermit's song, rising and falling through the still evening, under the
archways of hoary mountain forests that have endured from time
everlasting; the golden, leisurely chiming of the wood-thrush,
sounding on June afternoons, stanza by stanza, through the
sun-flecked groves of tall hickories, oaks, and chestnuts; with these
there is nothing in the nightingale's song to compare. But in volume
and continuity, in tuneful, voluble, rapid outpouring and ardor, above
all in skillful and intricate variation of theme, its song far
surpasses that of either of the thrushes. In all these respects it is
more just to compare it with the mocking-bird's, which, as a rule,
likewise falls short precisely on those points where the songs of the
two thrushes excel."
In his "Pastimes of an American Hunter" he says: "It is an
incalculable added pleasure to any one's sense of happiness if he or
she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and
enjoy the wonder-book of nature. All hunters should be nature-lovers.
It is to be hoped that the days of mere wasteful, boastful slaughter
are past, and that from now on the hunter will stand foremost in
working for the preservation and perpetuation of the wild life,
whether big or little." Surely this man is the rarest kind of a
sportsman.