The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [59]
R.B.R.’s voluminous diaries about fish, crabs, frogs, and turtles, kept through the mid-1870s, are even more telling of his daily commitment to studying nature than his cucumber and beanstalk logs. Here is an example of his science-laden style:
March 14, 1877
I visited State Hatching House. Everything in splendid order. Fish eggs clear and bright. Hatched in Hutton boxes till almost ready to come out, then placed on trays in troughs. All that come out head forest die…. Young Cal. brook trout and young Cal. salmon quite alike, and former handsomer than our B. trout but with blunter head than salmon; they have no carmine specks on their sides. Kennebeck salmon yearlings have yellow sides, much more so than Cal. salmon. Impregnated some eggs of B. trout Mar. 15, while there were 100,000 of fry with the sack absorbed. The spawning season lasting all winter.94
V
Robert B. Roosevelt obsessed over a varied group of wildlife species. And, why not, since he was Dr. Doolittle incarnate? Sometimes he would sit in front of Madison Square with George Francis Train, who published his own quirky newsletter, feeding crumbs to sparrows. Tremendously proud that the Roosevelt coat of arms showed ostrich feathers in plumes, R.B.R. said that they were “always borne with their tops curled over.”95 His personal papers are filled with long, well-written observations on oysters, including their alleged aphrodisiac properties. Minnows were another specialty of his, and he pioneered in studying their spring spawn. He took copious notes on eels, which he collected in tanks to scrutinize. By 1876, in fact, he was considered America’s authority on eels, although he admitted to not fully understanding their role in the food chain. Spencer Fullerton Baird was known to collect snakes in a barrel so R.B.R. decided to one-up him with eels. “Eels—are they kin to snakes?” he once asked in his diary. “We shall leave that question to Darwin and Huxley. You know they are the leaders of modern thought; and it takes a thought leader to find out a thing of that kind. They say eels are a connecting link between the batrachians and the true fishes, and, standing in that position, they are no kin, or, if any, very little, to snakes; though they may be cousin-german to a salamander or mud-puppy. But there is another question: how did the eel get into this position of middle-men? Did he evolute, so to speak, from his cousin catfish? Or did he involute from his cousin mud-puppy? Or did he proceed from that great practical evolutionist, his uncle bull-frog, who used to be a tadpole?”96
Robert B. Roosevelt’s unpublished notes on species are cheeky and he asks the same kind of Darwinian era questions as his precocious nephew Theodore. If Darwin could write entire chapters on orchids and beehives, R.B.R. saw no reason not to do a similar study on oysters and eels. Like most naturalists, R.B.R. valued observation more than reasoning, so his notes on fish—shad, pickerel, bass, bream, and sturgeon, in particular—are fiercely detailed. And few alive knew more about frogs—the animal, he claimed, “easiest victimized”—than Roosevelt. Whereas some naturalists dreamed of climbing Clingmans Dome in the Great Smokies or observing timber wolves at Isle Royale, R.B.R. fantasized about visiting