CHAPTER XIIISMALL COUNTRY NEIGHBORS

There is ample room for more complete life histories of many small beasts that are common enough around our country homes; and fortunately the need is now being met by various good field naturalists. Just last summer, in mid-July, 1907, I had an entirely novel experience with foxes, which illustrates how bold naturally shy creatures sometimes are after nightfall. Some of the boys and I were camping for the night on the beach by the Sound, under a clay bluff, having gone thither in the dory and the two light rowing skiffs; it was about a quarter of a mile from the place where we had seen the big red fox four or five years previously. The fire burned all night, and one or other of the party would now and then rise and stand by it; nevertheless, two young foxes, evidently cubs of the year, came round the fire, within plain sight, half a dozen times. They were picking up scraps; two or three times they came within ten yards of the fire. They were very active, scampering up the bluffs; and when in the bushes made a good deal of noise, whereas a full-grown fox generally moves in silence even when in dead brush.

Small mammals, with the exception of squirrels, are so much less conspicuous than birds, and indeed usually pass their lives in such seclusion, that the ordinary observeris hardly aware of their presence. At Sagamore Hill, for instance, except at haying time I rarely see the swarming meadow mice, the much less plentiful pine mice, or the little mole-shrews, alive, unless they happen to drop into a pit or sunken area which has been dug at one point to let light through a window into the cellar. The much more graceful and attractive white-footed mice and jumping mice are almost as rarely seen, though if one does come across a jumping mouse it at once attracts attention by its extraordinary leaps. The jumping mouse hibernates, like the woodchuck; and so does the chipmunk, though not always. The other little animals just mentioned are abroad all winter, the meadow mice under the snow, the white-footed mice, and often the shrews, above the snow. The tell-tale snow, showing all the tracks, betrays the hitherto unsuspected existence of many little creatures; and the commonest marks upon it are those of the rabbit and especially of the white-footed mouse. The shrew walks or trots and makes alternate footsteps in the snow. White-foot, on the contrary, always jumps, whether going slow or fast, and his hind feet leave their prints side by side, often with the mark where the tail has dragged. I think white-foot is the most plentiful of all our furred wild creatures, taken as a whole. He climbs trees well; I have found his nest in an old vireo’s nest; but more often under stumps or boards. The meadow mice often live in the marshes, and are entirely at home in the water.

The shrew-mouse which I most often find is a short-tailed, rather thickset little creature, not wholly unlikehis cousin the shrew-mole, and just as greedy and ferocious. When a boy I captured one of these mole-shrews and found to my astonishment that he was a bloodthirsty and formidable little beast of prey. He speedily killed and ate a partially grown white-footed mouse which I put in the same cage with him. (I think a full-grown mouse of this kind would be an overmatch for a shrew.) I then put a small snake in with him. The shrew was very active but seemed nearly blind, and as he ran to and fro he never seemed to be aware of the presence of anything living until he was close to it, when he would instantly spring on it like a tiger. On this occasion he attacked the little snake with great ferocity, and after an animated struggle in which the snake whipped and rolled all around the cage, throwing the shrew to and fro a dozen times, the latter killed and ate the snake in triumph. Larger snakes frequently eat shrews, by the way.

Once last summer, while several of us were playing on the tennis ground, a mole-shrew suddenly came out on the court. I first saw him near one of the side lines, and ran after him; I picked him up in my naked hand, whereupon he bit me, and I then took him in my handkerchief. After we had all looked at him I put him down, and he scuttled off among the grass and went down a little hole. We resumed our game, but after a few minutes the shrew reappeared, and this time crossed the tennis court near the net, while we gathered about him. He was an absurd little creature and his motion in running was precisely like that of one of those mechanicaltoys in the shape of mice or little bears which are wound up and run around on wheels. When we put our rackets before him he uttered little, shrill, long-continued squeals of irritation. We let him go off in the grass, and this time he did not reappear for the day; but next afternoon he repeated the feat.

My boys have at intervals displayed a liking for natural history, and one of them during some years took to trapping small mammals, discovering species that I had no idea existed in certain places; near Washington, but on the other side of the Potomac, he trapped several of those very dainty little creatures, the harvest mice.[7]One of my other boys—the special friend of Josiah the badger—discovered a flying-squirrel’s nest, in connection with which a rather curious incident occurred. The little boy had climbed a tree which is hollow at the top; and in this hollow he discovered a flying-squirrel mother with six young ones. She seemed so tame and friendly that the little boy for a moment hardly realized that she was a wild thing, and called down that he had “found a guinea pig up the tree.” Finally, the mother made up her mind to remove her family. She took each one in turn in her mouth and flew or sailed down from the top of the tree to the foot of another tree near by; ran up this, holding the little squirrel in her mouth; and again sailed down to the foot of another tree some distance off. Here she deposited her young one on the grass, and then, reversingthe process, climbed and sailed back to the tree where the nest was; then she took out another young one and returned with it, in exactly the same fashion as with the first. She repeated this until all six of the young ones were laid on the bank, side by side in a row, all with their heads the same way. Finding that she was not molested she ultimately took all six of the little fellows back to her nest, where she reared her brood undisturbed.

7. A visit of this same small boy, when eleven years old, to John Burroughs, is described by the latter in “Far and Near,” in the chapter called “Babes in the Woods.”

Flying squirrels become very gentle and attractive little pets if taken into the house. I cannot say as much for gray squirrels. Once when a small boy I climbed up to a large nest of dry leaves in the fork of a big chestnut tree, and from it picked out three very young squirrels. One died, but the other two I succeeded in rearing on a milk diet, which at first I was obliged to administer with a syringe. They grew up absolutely tame and would climb all over the various members of the household; but as they grew older they grew cross. If we children did something they did not like they would not only scold us vigorously, but, if they thought the provocation warranted it, would bite severely; and we finally exiled them to the woods. Gray squirrels, I am sorry to say, rob nests just as red squirrels do. At Sagamore Hill I have more than once been attracted by the alarm notes of various birds, and on investigation have found the winged woodland people in great agitation over a gray squirrel’s assault on the eggs or young of a thrush or vireo; and once one of these good-looking marauders came up the hill to harry a robin’s nest near the house. Many years ago I had an extraordinary experience with a gray squirrel.I was in the edge of some woods, and, seeing a squirrel, I stood motionless. The squirrel came to me and actually climbed up me; I made no movement until it began to nibble at my elbow, biting through my flannel shirt. When I moved, it of course jumped off, but it did not seem much frightened and lingered for some minutes in view, about thirty yards away. I have never understood the incident.

Among the small mammals at Sagamore Hill the chipmunks are the most familiar and the most in evidence; for they readily become tame and confiding. For three or four years a chipmunk—I suppose the same chipmunk—has lived near the tennis court; and it has developed the rather puzzling custom of sometimes scampering across the court while we are in the middle of a game. This has happened two or three times every year, and is rather difficult to explain, for the chipmunk could just as well go round the court, and there seems no possible reason why he should suddenly run out on it while the game is in full swing. If we see him, we all stop to watch him, and then he may himself stop and look about; but we may not see him until just as he is finishing a frantic scurry across, in imminent danger of being stepped on.

AUDREY TAKES THE BARSFrom a photograph, copyright, 1907, by Clinedinst

The most attractive and sociable pet among wild creatures of its size I have found to be a coon. One which when I was a boy I brought up from the time it was very young, was as playful and affectionate as any little dog, and used its little black paws just as if they were hands. Coons, by the way, sometimes appear in political campaigns. Frequently when I have been on the stump in places where there was still a strong tradition of the old Whig party as it was in the days of Henry Clay and Tippecanoe Harrison, I have reviewed processions in which log cabins and coons were prominent features. The log cabins were usually miniature representations, mounted on wheels, but the coons were genuine. Each was usually carried by some enthusiast, who might lead it by a chain and collar, but more frequently placed it upon a platform at the end of a pole, chained up short. Most naturally the coon protested violently against the proceedings; his only satisfaction being the certainty that every now and then some other parader would stumble near enough to be bitten. At one place an admirer suddenly presented me with one of these coons and was then swept on in the crowd; leaving me gingerly holding by the end of a chain an exceedingly active and short-tempered little beast, which I had not the slightest idea how to dispose of. On two other occasions, by the way, while off on campaign trips I was presented with bears. These I firmly refused to receive. One of them was brought to a platform by an old mountain hunter who, I am afraid, really had his feelings hurt by the refusal. The other bear made his appearance at Portland, Ore., and, of all places, was chained on top of a wooden platform just aft the smokestack of an engine, the engine being festooned with American flags. He belonged to the fireman, who had brought him as a special gift; I being an honorary member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. His owner explained thatnormally he was friendly; but the surroundings had curdled his temper.

Usually birds are very regular in their habits, so that not only the same species but the same individuals breed in the same places year after year. In spite of their wings they are almost as local as mammals and the same pair will usually keep to the same immediate neighborhood, where they can always be looked for in their season. There are wooded or brush-grown swampy places not far from the White House where in the spring or summer I can count with certainty upon seeing wrens, chats, and the ground-loving Kentucky warbler, an attractive little bird, which, by the way, itself looks much like a miniature chat. There are other places, in the neighborhood of Rock Creek, where I can be almost certain of finding the blue-gray gnatcatcher, which ranks just next to the humming-bird itself in exquisite daintiness and delicacy. The few pairs of mocking-birds around Washington have just as sharply defined haunts.

Nevertheless it is never possible to tell when one may run across a rare bird; and even birds that are not rare now and then show marked individual idiosyncrasy in turning up, or even breeding, in unexpected places. At Sagamore Hill, for instance, I never knew a purple finch to breed until the summer of 1906. Then two pairs nested with us, one right by the house and the other near the stable. My attention was drawn to them by the bold, cheerful singing of the males, who were spurred to rivalry by one another’s voices. In September of the same year, while sitting in a rocking-chair on the broad verandalooking out over the Sound, I heard the unmistakable “ank-ank” of nuthatches from a young elm at one corner of the house. I strolled over, expecting to find the white-bellied nuthatch, which is rather common on Long Island. But instead there were a couple of red-bellied nuthatches, birds familiar to me in the Northern woods, but which I had never before seen at Sagamore Hill. They were tame and fearless, running swiftly up and down the tree-trunk and around the limbs while I stood and looked at them not ten feet away. The two younger boys ran out to see them; and then we hunted up their picture in Wilson. I find, by the way, that Audubon’s and Wilson’s are still the most satisfactory large ornithologies, at least for nature lovers who are not specialists; of course any attempt at serious study of our birds means recourse to the numerous and excellent books and pamphlets by recent observers. Bendire’s large work gives admirable biographies of all the birds it treats of; unfortunately it was never finished.

In May, 1907, two pairs of robins built their substantial nests, and raised their broods, on the piazza at Sagamore Hill; one over the transom of the north hall door and one over the transom of the south hall door. Another pair built their nest and raised their brood on a rafter in the half-finished new barn, quite undisturbed by the racket of the carpenters who were finishing it. A pair of scarlet tanagers built near the tennis ground; the male kept in the immediate neighborhood all the time, flaming among the branches, and singing steadily until the last part of July. To my ears the song of the tanager is likea louder, more brilliant, less leisurely rendering of the red-eyed vireo’s song; but with the characteristic “chip-churr” every now and then interspersed. Only one pair of purple finches returned to us last summer; and for the first time in many years no Baltimore orioles built in the elm by the corner of the house; they began their nest but for some reason left it unfinished. The red-winged blackbirds, however, were more plentiful than for years previously, and two pairs made their nests near the old barn, where the grass stood lush and tall; this was the first time they had ever built nearer than the wood-pile pond, and I believe it was owing to the season being so cold and wet. It was perhaps due to the same cause that so many black-throated green warblers spent June and July in the woods on our place; they must have been breeding, though I only noticed the males. Each kept to his own special tract of woodland, among the tops of the tall trees, seeming to prefer the locusts, and throughout June, and far into July, each sang all day long—a drawling, cadenced little warble of five or six notes, the first two being the most noticeable near by, though, rather curiously, the next two were the notes that had most carrying power. The song was usually uttered at intervals of a few seconds; sometimes while the singer was perched motionless, sometimes as he flitted and crawled actively among the branches. With the resident of one particular grove I became well acquainted, as I was chopping a path through the grove. Every day when I reached the grove, I found the little warbler singing away, and at least half the time in one particular locust tree. He paidnot the slightest attention to my chopping; whereas a pair of downy woodpeckers and a pair of great-crested fly-catchers, both of them evidently nesting near by, were much put out by my presence. While listening to my little black-throated friend, I could also continually hear the songs of his cousins, the prairie warbler, the redstart, the black-and-white creeper and the Maryland yellow-throat; not to speak of oven-birds, towhees, thrashers, vireos, and the beautiful golden-voiced wood thrushes.

The black-throated green warblers have seemingly become regular summer residents of Long Island, for after discovering them on my place I found that two or three bird-loving neighbors were already familiar with them; and I heard them on several different occasions as I rode through the country roundabout. I already knew as summer residents in my neighborhood the following representatives of the warbler family: the oven-bird, chat, black-and-white creeper, Maryland yellow-throat, summer yellow-bird, prairie warbler, pine warbler, blue-winged warbler, golden-winged warbler (very rare), blue yellow-backed warbler and redstart.

The black-throated green as a breeder and summer resident is a newcomer who has extended his range southward. But this same summer I found one warbler, the presence of which, if more than accidental, means that a southern form is extending its range northward. This was the Dominican or yellow-throated warbler. Two of my bird-loving neighbors are Mrs. E. H. Swan, Jr., and Miss Alice Weekes. On July 4th Mrs. Swan told me that a new warbler, the yellow-throated, was living neartheir house, and that she and her husband had seen it there on several occasions. I was rather skeptical, and told her I thought that it must be a Maryland yellow-throat. Mrs. Swan meekly acquiesced in the theory that she might have been mistaken; but two or three days afterward she sent me word that she and Miss Weekes had seen the bird again, had examined it thoroughly through their glasses, and were sure that it was a yellow-throated warbler. Accordingly on the morning of the 8th I walked down and met them both near Mrs. Swan’s house, about a mile from Sagamore Hill. We did not have to wait long before we heard an unmistakably new warbler’s song, loud, ringing, sharply accented, just as the yellow-throat’s song is described in Chapman’s book. At first the little bird kept high in the tops of the pines, but after a while he came to the lower branches and we were able to see him distinctly. Only a glance was needed to show that my two friends were quite right in their identification and that the bird was undoubtedly the Dominican or yellow-throated warbler. Its bill was as long as that of a black-and-white creeper, giving the head a totally different look from that of any of its brethren, the other true wood-warblers; and the olive-gray back, yellow-throat and breast, streaked sides, white belly, black cheek and forehead, and white line above the eye and spot on the side of the neck, could all be plainly made out. The bird kept continually uttering its loud, sharply modulated, and attractive warble. It never left the pines, and though continually on the move, it yet moved with a certain deliberation like a pine warbler, and not with the fussy agility of most of its kinsfolk. Occasionally it would catch some insect on the wing, but most of the time kept hopping about among the needle-clad clusters of the pine twigs, or moving along the larger branches, stopping from time to time to sing. Now and then it would sit still on one twig for several minutes, singing at short intervals and preening its feathers.

THE STONE WALLFrom a photograph by Mrs. Herbert Wadsworth

After looking at it for nearly an hour we had to solve the rather difficult ethical question as to whether we ought to kill it or not. In these cases it is always hard to draw the line between heartlessness and sentimentality. In our own minds we were sure of our identification, and did not feel that we could be mistaken, but we were none of us professed ornithologists, and as far as I knew the bird was really rare thus far north; so that it seemed best to shoot him, which was accordingly done. I was influenced in this decision, in the first place because warblers are so small that it is difficult for any observer to be absolutely certain as to their identification; and in the next place by the fact that the breeding season was undoubtedly over, and that this was an adult male, so that no harm came to the species. I very strongly feel that there should be no “collecting” of rare and beautiful species when this is not imperatively demanded. Mocking-birds, for instance, are very beautiful birds, well known and unmistakable; and there is not the slightest excuse for “collecting” their nests and eggs or shooting specimens of them, no matter where they may be found. So, there is no excuse for shooting scarlet tanagers, summer redbirds, cardinals, nor of course any of the common,well-known friends of the lawn, the garden and the farm land; and with most birds nowadays observations on their habits are of far more value than their skins can possibly be. But there must be some shooting, especially of obscure and little-known birds, or we would never be able to identify them at all; while most laymen are not sufficiently close observers to render it possible to trust their identification of rare species.

In one apple tree in the orchard we find a flicker’s nest every year; the young make a queer, hissing, bubbling sound, a little like the boiling of a pot. This same year one of the young ones fell out; I popped it back into the hole, whereupon its brothers and sisters “boiled” for several minutes like the cauldron of a small and friendly witch. John Burroughs, and a Long Island neighbor, John Lewis Childs, drove over to see me, in this same June of 1907, and I was able to show them the various birds of most interest—the purple finch, the black-throated green warbler, the redwings in their unexpected nesting place by the old barn, and the orchard orioles and yellow-billed cuckoos in the garden. The orchard orioles this year took much interest in the haying, gleaning in the cut grass for grasshoppers. The barn swallows that nest in the stable raised second broods, which did not leave the nest until the end of July. When the barn swallows gather in their great flocks just prior to the southward migration, the gathering sometimes takes place beside a house, and then the swallows seem to get so excited and bewildered that they often fly into the house. When I was a small boy I took a keen, although not avery intelligent, interest in natural history, and solemnly recorded whatever I thought to be notable. When I was nine years old we were passing the summer near Tarrytown, on the Hudson. My diary for September 4, 1868, runs as follows: “Cold and rainy. I was called in from breakfast to a room. When I went in there what was my surprise to see on walls, curtains and floor about forty swallows. All the morning long in every room of the house (even the kitchen) were swallows. They were flying south. Several hundred were outside and about seventy-five in the house. I caught most of them (and put them out of the windows). The others got out themselves. One flew on my pants where he stayed until I took him off.”

At the White House we are apt to stroll around the grounds for a few minutes after breakfast; and during the migrations, especially in spring, I often take a pair of field glasses so as to examine any bird as to the identity of which I am doubtful. From the end of April the warblers pass in troops—myrtle, magnolia, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, blackburnian, black-throated blue, blue-winged, Canadian, and many others, with at the very end of the season the black-poll—all of them exquisite little birds, but not conspicuous as a rule, except perhaps the blackburnian, whose brilliant orange throat and breast flame when they catch the sunlight as he flits among the trees. The males in their dress of courtship are easily recognized by any one who has Chapman’s book on the warblers. On May 4, 1906, I saw a Cape May warbler, the first I had ever seen. It was in a small pine. It wasfearless, allowing a close approach, and as it was a male in high plumage, it was unmistakable.

In 1907, after a very hot week in early March, we had an exceedingly late and cold spring. The first bird I heard sing in the White House grounds was a white-throated sparrow on March 1st, a song sparrow speedily following. The white-throats stayed with us until the middle of May, overlapping the arrival of the indigo buntings; but during the last week in April and first week in May their singing was drowned by the music of the purple finches, which I never before saw in such numbers around the White House. When we sat by the south fountain, under an apple tree then blossoming, sometimes three or four purple finches would be singing in the fragrant bloom overhead. In June a pair of wood thrushes and a pair of black-and-white creepers made their homes in the White House grounds, in addition to our ordinary homemakers, the flickers, redheads, robins, catbirds, song sparrows, chippies, summer yellow-birds, grackles, and, I am sorry to say, crows. A handsome sapsucker spent a week with us. In the same year five night herons spent January and February in a swampy tract by the Potomac, half a mile or so from the White House.

At Mount Vernon there are of course more birds than there are around the White House, for it is in the country. At present but one mocking-bird sings around the house itself, and in the gardens and the woods of the immediate neighborhood. Phœbe birds nest at the heads of the columns under the front portico; and a pair—or rather, doubtless, a succession of pairs—has nested in Washington’stomb itself, for the twenty years since I have known it. The cardinals, beautiful in plumage, and with clear ringing voices, are characteristic of the place. I am glad to say that the woods still hold many gray—not red—foxes; the descendants of those which Washington so perseveringly hunted.

At Oyster Bay on a desolate winter afternoon many years ago I shot an Ipswich sparrow on a strip of ice-rimmed beach, where the long coarse grass waved in front of a growth of blue berries, beach plums and stunted pines. I think it was the same winter that we were visited not only by flocks of cross-bills, pine linnets, red-polls and pine grossbeaks, but by a number of snowy owls, which flitted to and fro in ghost-like fashion across the wintry landscape and showed themselves far more diurnal in their habits than our native owls. One fall about the same time a pair of duck-hawks appeared off the bay. It was early, before many ducks had come, and they caused havoc among the night herons, which were then very numerous in the marshes around Lloyd’s Neck, there being a big heronry in the woods near by. Once I saw a duck-hawk come around the bend of the shore, and dart into a loose gang of young night herons, still in the brown plumage, which had jumped from the marsh at my approach. The pirate struck down three herons in succession and sailed swiftly on without so much as looking back at his victims.[8]The herons, which are usuallyrather dull birds, showed every sign of terror whenever the duck-hawk appeared in the distance; whereas, they paid no heed to the fish-hawks as they sailed overhead. I found the carcass of a black-headed or Bonaparte’s gull which had probably been killed by one of these duck-hawks; these gulls appear in the early fall, before their bigger brothers, the herring gulls, have come for their winter stay. The spotted sand-pipers often build far away from water; while riding, early in July, 1907, near Cold Spring, my horse almost stepped on a little fellow that could only just have left the nest. It was in a dry road between upland fields; the parents were near by, and betrayed much agitation. The little fish-crows are not rare around Washington, though not so common as the ordinary crows; once I shot one at Oyster Bay. They are not so wary as their larger kinsfolk, but are quite as inveterate destroyers of the eggs and nestlings of more attractive birds. The soaring turkey buzzards, so beautiful on the wing and so loathsome near by, are seen everywhere around the Capital.

8. Dr. Lambert last fall, on a hunting trip in Northern Quebec, found a gyrfalcon on an island in a lake which had just killed a great blue heron; the heron’s feathers were scattered all over the lake. Lambert also shot a great horned owl in the dusk one evening, and found that it had a half-eaten duck in its claws.

Bird songs are often puzzling, and it is nearly impossible to write them down so that any one but the writer will recognize them. Moreover, as we ascribe to them qualities, such as plaintiveness or gladness, which really exist in our own minds and not in the songs themselves, two different observers, equally accurate, may ascribe widely different qualities to the same song. To me, for instance, the bush sparrow’s song is more attractive than the vesper sparrow’s; but I think most of my friends feel just the reverse way about the two songs. To most ofus the bobolink’s song bubbles over with rollicking merriment, with the glad joy of mere living; whereas the thrushes, the meadow lark, the white-throated sparrow, all have a haunting strain of sadness or plaintiveness in their melody; but I am by no means sure that there is the slightest difference of this kind in the singers. Most of the songs of the common birds I recognize fairly well; but even with these birds there will now and then be a call, or a few bars, which I do not recognize; and if I hear a bird but seldom, I find much difficulty in recalling its song, unless it is very well marked indeed. Last spring I for a long time utterly failed to recognize the song of a water thrush by Rock Creek; and later in the season I on one occasion failed to make out the flight song of an oven-bird until in the middle of it the singer suddenly threw in two or three of the characteristic “teacher, teacher” notes. Even in neighborhoods with which I am familiar I continually hear songs and calls which I cannot place.

In Albemarle County, Virginia, we have a little place called Pine Knot, where we sometimes go, taking some or all of the children, for a three or four days’ outing. It is a mile from the big stock farm, Plain Dealing, belonging to an old friend, Mr. Joseph Wilmer. The trees and flowers are like those of Washington, but their general close resemblance to those of Long Island is set off by certain exceptions. There are osage orange hedges, and in spring many of the roads are bordered with bands of the brilliant yellow blossoms of the flowering broom, introduced by Jefferson. There are great willow oakshere and there in the woods or pastures, and occasional groves of noble tulip trees in the many stretches of forest; these tulip trees growing to a much larger size than on Long Island. As at Washington, among the most plentiful flowers are the demure little Quaker Ladies, which are not found at Sagamore Hill—where we also miss such northern forms as the wake robin and the other trilliums, which used to be among the characteristic marks of spring-time at Albany. At Pine Knot the red bug, dogwood and laurel are plentiful; though in the case of the last two no more so than at Sagamore Hill. The azalea—its Knickerbocker name in New York was pinkster—grows and flowers far more luxuriantly than on Long Island. The moccasin flower, the china-blue Virginia cowslip with its pale pink buds, the blood-red Indian pink, the painted columbine and many, many other flowers somewhat less showy carpet the woods.

The birds are, of course, for the most part the same as on Long Island, but with some differences. These differences are, in part, due to the more southern locality; but in part I cannot explain them, for birds will often be absent from one place seemingly without any real reason. Thus around us in Albemarle County song-sparrows are certainly rare and I have not seen savanna sparrows at all; but the other common sparrows, such as the chippy, field sparrow, vesper sparrow, and grasshopper sparrow abound; and in an open field where bind-weed morning glories and evening primroses grew among the broom sedge, I found some small grass-dwelling sparrows, which with the exercise of some little patience I was able tostudy at close quarters with the glasses; as I had no gun I could not be positive about their identification, though I was inclined to believe that they were Henslow’s sparrows. Of birds of brilliant color there are six species—the cardinal, the summer redbird and the scarlet tanager, in red, and the bluebird, indigo bunting, and blue grossbeak, in blue. I saw but one pair of blue grossbeaks; but the little indigo buntings abound, and bluebirds are exceedingly common, breeding in numbers. It has always been a puzzle to me why they do not breed around us at Sagamore Hill, where I only see them during the migrations. Neither the rosy summer redbirds nor the cardinals are quite as brilliant as the scarlet tanagers, which fairly burn like live flames; but the tanager is much less common than either of the others in Albemarle County, and it is much less common than it is at Sagamore Hill. Among the singers the wood thrush is not common, but the meadow lark abounds. The yellow-breasted chat is everywhere and in the spring its clucking, whistling and calling seem never to stop for a minute. The white-eyed vireo is found in the same thick undergrowth as the chat and among the smaller birds it is one of those most in evidence to the ear. In one or two places I came across parties of the long-tailed Bewick’s wren, as familiar as the house wren but with a very different song. There are gentle mourning doves; and black-billed cuckoos seem more common than the yellow-bills. The mocking-birds are, as always, most interesting. I was much amused to see one of them following two crows; when they lit in a plowed field the mocking-bird paradedalongside of them six feet off, and then fluttered around to the attack. The crows, however, were evidently less bothered by it than they would have been by a kingbird. At Plain Dealing many birds nest within a stone’s throw of the rambling attractive house, with its numerous outbuildings, old garden, orchard, and venerable locusts and catalpas. Among them are Baltimore and orchard orioles, purple grackles, flickers and red-headed woodpeckers, bluebirds, robins, kingbirds and indigo buntings. One observation which I made was of real interest. On May 18, 1907, I saw a small party of a dozen or so of passenger pigeons, birds I had not seen for a quarter of a century and never expected to see again. I saw them two or three times flying hither and thither with great rapidity, and once they perched in a tall dead pine on the edge of an old field. They were unmistakable; yet the sight was so unexpected that I almost doubted my eyes, and I welcomed a bit of corroborative evidence coming from Dick, the colored foreman at Plain Dealing. Dick is a frequent companion of mine in rambles around the country, and he is an unusually close and accurate observer of birds, and of wild things generally. Dick had mentioned to me having seen some “wild carrier pigeons,” as he called them; and, thinking over this remark of his, after I had returned to Washington, I began to wonder whether he too might not have seen passenger pigeons. Accordingly I wrote to Mr. Wilmer, asking him to question Dick and find out what the “carrier pigeons” looked like. His answering letter runs in part as follows:

“On May 12th last Dick saw a flock of about thirty wild pigeons, followed at a short distance by about half as many, flying in a circle very rapidly, between the Plain Dealing house and the woods, where they disappeared. They had pointed tails and resembled somewhat large doves—the breast and sides rather a brownish red. He had seen them before, but many years ago. I think it is unquestionably the passenger pigeon—Ectopistes migratorius—described on p. 25 of the 5th volume of Audubon. I remember the pigeon roosts as he describes them, on a smaller scale, but large flocks have not been seen in this part of Virginia for many years.”

I fear, by the way, that the true prairie chicken, one of the most characteristic American game birds, will soon follow the passenger pigeon. My two elder sons have now and then made trips for prairie chickens and ducks to the Dakotas. Last summer, 1907, the second boy returned from such a trip—which he had ended by a successful deer hunt in Wisconsin—with the melancholy information that the diminution in the ranks of the prairie fowl in the Dakotas was very evident.

The house at Pine Knot consists of one long room, with a broad piazza, below, and three small bedrooms above. It is made of wood, with big outside chimneys at each end. Wood rats and white-footed mice visit it; once a weasel came in after them; now a flying squirrel has made his home among the rafters. On one side the pines and on the other side the oaks come up to the walls; in front the broom sedge grows almost to the piazza and above the line of its waving plumes we look across the beautiful rolling Virginia farm country to the foothillsof the Blue Ridge. At night whippoorwills call incessantly around us. In the late spring or early summer we usually take breakfast and dinner on the veranda listening to mocking-bird, cardinal, and Carolina wren, as well as to many more common singers. In the winter the little house can only be kept warm by roaring fires in the great open fireplaces, for there is no plaster on the walls, nothing but the bare wood. Then the table is set near the blazing logs at one end of the long room which makes up the lower part of the house, and at the other end the colored cook—Jim Crack by name—prepares the delicious Virginia dinner; while around him cluster the little darkies, who go on errands, bring in wood, or fetch water from the spring, to put in the bucket which stands below where the gourd hangs on the wall. Outside the wind moans or the still cold bites if the night is quiet; but inside there is warmth and light and cheer.

There are plenty of quail and rabbits in the fields and woods near by, so we live partly on what our guns bring in; and there are also wild turkeys. I spent the first three days of November, 1906, in a finally successful effort to kill a wild turkey. Each morning I left the house between three and five o’clock, under a cold brilliant moon. The frost was heavy; and my horse shuffled over the frozen ruts as I rode after Dick. I was on the turkey grounds before the faintest streak of dawn had appeared in the east; and I worked as long as daylight lasted. It was interesting and attractive in spite of the cold. In the night we heard the quavering screech owls; and occasionally the hooting of one of their bigger brothers. At dawn we listened to the lusty hammering of the big logcocks, or to the curious coughing or croaking sound of a hawk before it left its roost. Now and then loose flocks of small birds straggled past us as we sat in the blind, or rested to eat our lunch; chickadees, tufted tits, golden-crested kinglets, creepers, cardinals, various sparrows and small woodpeckers. Once we saw a shrike pounce on a field mouse by a haystack; once we came on a ruffed grouse sitting motionless in the road.

ROSWELL BEHAVES LIKE A GENTLEMANFrom a photograph, copyright, 1907, by Clinedinst

The last day I had with me Jim Bishop, a man who had hunted turkeys by profession, a hard-working farmer, whose ancestors have for generations been farmers and woodmen; an excellent hunter, tireless, resourceful, with an eye that nothing escaped; just the kind of a man one likes to regard as typical of what is best in American life. Until this day, and indeed until the very end of this day, chance did not favor us. We tried to get up to the turkeys on the roost before daybreak; but they roosted in pines and, night though it was, they were evidently on the lookout, for they always saw us long before we could make them out, and then we could hear them fly out of the tree-tops. Turkeys are quite as wary as deer, and we never got a sight of them while we were walking through the woods; but two or three times we flushed gangs, and my companion then at once built a little blind of pine boughs in which we sat while he tried to call the scattered birds up to us by imitating, with marvellous fidelity, their yelping. Twice a turkey started toward us, but on each occasion the old hen began calling some distance off andall the scattered birds at once went toward her. At other times I would slip around to one side of a wood while my companion walked through it, but either there were no turkeys or they went out somewhere far away from me.

On the last day I was out thirteen hours. Finally, late in the afternoon, Jim Bishop marked a turkey into a point of pines which stretched from a line of wooded hills down into a narrow open valley on the other side of which again rose wooded hills. I ran down to the end of the point and stood behind a small oak, while Bishop and Dick walked down through the trees to drive the turkey toward me. This time everything went well; the turkey came out of the cover not too far off and sprang into the air, heading across the valley and offering me a side shot at forty yards as he sailed by. It was just the distance for the close-shooting ten-bore duck gun I carried; and at the report down came the turkey in a heap, not so much as a leg or wing moving. It was an easy shot. But we had hunted hard for three days; and the turkey is the king of American game birds; and, besides, I knew he would be very good eating indeed when we brought him home; so I was as pleased as possible when Dick lifted the fine young gobbler, his bronze plumage iridescent in the light of the westering sun.

Formerly we could ride across country in any direction around Washington and almost as soon as we left the beautiful, tree-shaded streets of the city we were in the real country. But as Washington grows, it naturally—and to me most regrettably—becomes less and less like its former, glorified-village, self; and wire fencinghas destroyed our old cross-country rides. Fortunately there are now many delightful bridle trails in Rock Creek Park; and we have fixed up a number of good jumps at suitable places—a stone wall, a water jump, a bank with a ditch, two or three posts-and-rails, about four feet high, and some stiff brush hurdles, one of five feet seven inches. The last, which is the only formidable jump was put up to please two sporting members of the administration, Bacon and Meyer. Both of them school their horses over it; and my two elder boys, and Fitzhugh Lee, my cavalry aide, also school my horses over it. On one of my horses, Roswell, I have gone over it myself; and as I weigh two hundred pounds without my saddle I think that the jump, with such a weight, in cold blood, should be credited to Roswell for righteousness. Roswell is a bay gelding; Audrey a black mare; they are Virginia horses. In the spring of 1907 I had photographs of them taken going over the various jumps. Roswell is a fine jumper, and usually goes at his jumps in a spirit of matter-of-fact enjoyment. But he now and then shows queer kinks in his temper. On one of these occasions he began by wishing to rush his jumps, and by trying to go over the wings instead of the jumps themselves. He fought hard for his head; and as it happened that the best picture we got of him in the air was at this particular time, it gives a wrong idea of his ordinary behavior, and also, I sincerely trust, a wrong idea of my hands. Generally he takes his jumps like a gentleman.

Many of the men with whom I hunted or with whom I was brought in close contact when I lived on my ranch,and still more of the men who were with me in the Rough Riders, have shared in some way or other in my later political life. Phil Stewart was one of the Presidential Electors who in 1904 gave me Colorado’s vote; Merrifield filled the same position in Montana and is now Marshal of that State. Cecil Lyon and Sloan Simpson, of Texas, were delegates for me at the National Convention which nominated me in 1904. Sewell is Collector of Customs in Maine; Sylvans and Joe Ferris are respectively Register of the Land Office and Postmaster in North Dakota; Dennis Shea with whom I worked on the Little Missouri round-up holds my commission as Marshal of North Dakota. Abernathy the wolf hunter is my Marshal in Oklahoma. John Willis declined to take any place; when he was last my guest at the White House he told me, I am happy to say, that he does better with his ranch than he could have done with any office. Johnny Goff is a forest ranger near the Yellowstone Park. Seth Bullock is Marshal of South Dakota; he too is an old friend of my ranch days and was sheriff in the Black Hills when I was deputy sheriff due north of him in Billings County, in the then Territory of Dakota. Among the people that we both arrested, by the way, was a young man named “Calamity Joe,” a very well-meaning fellow but a wild boy who had gone astray, as wild boys often used to go astray on the frontier, through bad companionship. To my great amusement his uncle turned up as United States Senator some fifteen years later, and was one of my staunch allies. Of the men of the regiment Lieutenant Colonel Brodie I made Governor of Arizona, Captain Frantz, Governor of Oklahoma, and Captain Curry Governor of New Mexico. Ben Daniels I appointed Marshal of Arizona; Colbert, the Chickasaw, Marshal in the Indian Territory. Llewellyn is District Attorney in New Mexico. Jenkins is Collector of Internal Revenue in South Carolina. Fred Herrig, who was with me on the Little Missouri, where we hunted the blacktail and the bighorn together, and who later served under me at Santiago, is a forest ranger in Montana; and many other men of my old regiment have taken up with unexpected interest occupations as diverse as those of postmaster, of revenue agent, of land and forest officers of various kinds. Joe Lee is Minister to Ecuador; John McIlhenny is Civil Service Commissioner; Craig Wadsworth is Secretary of Legation at the Court of St. James; Mason Mitchell is Consul in China, having already been Consul at Mozambique, where he spent his holidays in hunting the biggest of the world’s big game.

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