Part 3 (1/2)

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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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.