Camping & Tramping with Roosevelt

by John Burroughs

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.