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 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.
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."