Camping & Tramping with Roosevelt Part 3

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AS A NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AS A NATURE-LOVER AND OBSERVER

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 pa.s.sion 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 gla.s.ses upon him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 hoa.r.s.e 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 superst.i.tious, 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 gra.s.s, a few yards below the front of the house.

There were young birds in it, and as the President had seen the gra.s.shopper 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 gra.s.shopper 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 gra.s.shopper 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 Th.o.r.eau, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 p.r.o.nghorn?" 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 p.r.o.nghorn 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 p.r.o.nghorn, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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: