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By Root 4169 0

was surprised. Starting in early 1900, Governor Roosevelt began promoting the virtues of “citizen bird” with a new zeal. Public awareness, the governor and his followers believed, was always the first step in winning a political battle in the United States. The previous year, the magazine Audubon had come into existence; its editor, Frank M. Chapman, was hoping to lead an effort to create bird reservations throughout the United States (particularly in New York and Florida). There was a movement afoot, encouraging individual participation in field research projects, surveys, censuses, and polls. The central idea was that every American community could have its own bird sanctuary. People were encouraged to have binoculars or field glasses ready at home. For the first time backyard bird feeders and ceramic birdbaths were erected by everyday citizens hoping to attract crossbills and grosbeaks. Sunflower seed feeders, for example, attracted jays, finches, and chickadees. One company started manufacturing nectar feeders—tubes filled with sugar water—to attract hummingbirds. Vacations were planned around simply spying on a new bird with alert eyes. Hard-core enthusiasts, those rich enough to travel, could be found looking for the greater prairie chicken in the sand hills of Nebraska or sighting the Chihuahuan raven in the borderlands of Texas.68

It is hard for some people to understand what made Roosevelt love birds so deeply when other influential contemporaries paid them so little mind. Its safe to say, for example, that Roosevelt was the only serious bird-watcher to ever become president of the United States. In the final analysis, virtually all ornithologists—Burroughs, Chapman, and Grinnell included—were people who just started counting the birds they saw and got carried away. Blessed with some sixth sense, birders like Roosevelt believed avians could be key to the biblical drama of Genesis. And the pastime of bird-watching wasn’t exclusively for the rich. Those actively predisposed to birding—27 million strong in the United States by 2009, making this the nation’s single most popular hobby 100 years after Roosevelt’s presidency ended—take joy in seeing the sudden movement of a warbler or in hearing a veery pierce the afternoon silence with its song.69 Despite some differences in temperament, Roosevelt, Burroughs, and other leading naturalists shared a desire to personally witness as many as possible of the nearly 700 species that spent time east of the 100th meridian.

Besides Sagamore Hill, one of Roosevelt’s favorite places to go birding in 1900 was the woodlands in and around the Bronx Zoo. Throughout his life Roosevelt would traverse bogs, prairie potholes, and wetlands just to see a particularly rare bird. He knew that the best birding occurred in transition areas where two or three habitats met—what modern ecologists call ecotones. Just wandering around the Bronx grounds reconfirmed his belief that, as Pinchot held, forests were a necessary precondition for species survival. Waterfowl—with the exception of the African pygmy goose—always nested in high places, usually trees. Roosevelt fretted that New York’s migratory birds faced triple jeopardy: the fragmentations of northern breeding grounds; the disappearance of nesting and feeding areas along migratory routes; and deforestation of the Adirondacks and wintering grounds in Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. He didn’t worry about some adaptable species, such as the northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), whose year-round purty-purty-purty was a soothing antidote to the industrial noise of the nearby Bronx. Mourning doves and blue jays were also easily found in backyards. But other species he encountered using the zoo as a refuge—for example, the black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapilla) and northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos)—might need human rehabilitation efforts to help them survive the impact of industrialization. Too much of the New York City habitat had been cut into pieces for roads and buildings, but Roosevelt’s zoo would be a thickly forested