In his college days, he had intended to be a naturalist, and natural history remained his strongest avocation. And so he taught his children to know the birds and animals, the trees, plants, and flowers of Oyster Bay and its neighbourhood. They had their pets—Kermit, one of the boys, carried a pet rat in his pocket.
Three things Roosevelt required of them all: obedience, manliness, and truthfulness.
William Roscoe Thayer
OFF WITH JOHN BURROUGHS
From Roosevelt’s Autobiography
One April, I went to Yellowstone Park, when the snow was still very deep, and I took John Burroughs with me. I wished to show him the big game of the Park, the wild creatures that have become so astonishingly tame and tolerant of human presence.
In the Yellowstone, the animals seem always to behave as one wishes them to! It is always possible to see the sheep, and deer, and antelope, and also the great herds of elk, which are shyer than the smaller beasts.
In April, we found the elk weak after the short commons and hard living of Winter. Once, without much difficulty, I regularly rounded up a big band of them so that John Burroughs could look at them. I do not think, however, that he cared to see them as much as I did.
The birds interested him more, especially a tiny owl, the size of a robin, which we saw perched on the top of a tree, in mid-afternoon, entirely uninfluenced by the sun, and making a queer noise like a cork being pulled from a bottle.
I was rather ashamed to find how much better his eyes were than mine, in seeing the birds and grasping their differences.
Theodore Roosevelt