The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [23]
As a boy, Roosevelt developed a keen sense of hearing, perhaps as compensation for his extreme nearsightedness. When he was twelve, his parents finally bought him spectacles, and a whole new world of avian color blossomed in front of him: for example, the bright plumage of indigo buntings and red cardinals shone for the first time as though dipped in Day-Glo. Roosevelt was interrogative about birds, believing they were messengers from prehistoric times. “It was the world of birds—birds, above all—that burst upon him now, upstaging all else in his eyes,” the historian David McCullough explained of the adolescent Roosevelt, “now that he could actually see them in colors and in numbers beyond anything he had ever imagined.”38
As a budding ornithologist Roosevelt also mastered the identification of a bird by the way it flew. If he saw a moderate rise and fall, the bird could be a woodpecker or northern flicker. Other birds, however—like hawks, egrets, herons, and crows—flew in a straight line, flapping their wings in constant rhythm. He learned that studying a bird’s feather shape, color, and pattern was another way to properly identify it. And then, of course, there were the differences in bird’s beaks, which from a utilitarian standpoint were better than Swiss army knives: they caught and held food, preened feathers, and built nests. There were thousands of different types of birds in the world and Roosevelt wanted to identify them all: a lofty goal that became a lifelong pursuit, which he never abandoned. “Roosevelt was part of a generation of men,” the naturalist Jonathan Rosen has explained in The Life of the Skies, “who helped mark the transition from the nature-collecting frenzy that followed the Civil War to what we today recognize as birdwatching.”39
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Roosevelt’s mother greatly encouraged her son’s fascination with birds. Martha Bulloch Roosevelt (or Mittie, as she was usually called) was born on July 8, 1835, in Connecticut but grew up in Savannah and then Roswell, Georgia, north of Atlanta. She was something of a southern belle, with a gentle air about her; her two brothers had fought for the Confederate army in the Civil War. Even though Mittie married a Yankee—Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., of New York—and moved to Manhattan, she never abandoned her Johnny Rebel sympathies. After the surrender at Appomattox she tended to romanticize the “lost cause,” always championing the Gray over the Blue, furious over the way captured Georgian soldiers had been mistreated in prison camps in Illinois and Maryland. Most of Mittie’s reflections on the South, however, were idyllic. Her yarns about Georgia red clay, black bears, and beige panthers always kept her children wide-eyed. Because of Mittie, in fact, the piney woods of Georgia—the shortleaf, longleaf, loblolly, and slash pine—had an enduring fascination for Theodore. Encouraged by Mittie, Theodore became a die-hard enthusiast of natural history, a collector enraptured by birds. She even allowed into the Roosevelt household exotic live creatures like flying squirrels and newts. “My triumphs,” Roosevelt recalled of his childhood, “consisted in such things as bringing home and raising—by the aid of milk and a syringe—a family of very young gray squirrels, in fruitlessly endeavoring to tame an excessively unamiable woodchuck, and in making friends with a gentle, pretty, trustful white-footed mouse which reared her family in an empty flower pot.” 40
In the spring of 1868, Theodore’s parents traveled to Roswell to visit Martha’s relatives. A fascinating correspondence between mother and son