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journals continued without a hitch. Whenever he found a flock of sandpipers or a delicate nest of golden-crowned kinglets—to cite just two examples from that spring—he’d dutifully record the observations in notebooks labeled with pseudoscientific titles like “Remarks on the Zoology of Oyster Bay” or “Field Book of Zoology.” Using Elliott Coues’s excellent Key to North American Birds—first published in 1872—as his principal classification tool, Roosevelt was determined to carry the ornithological torch for both Osborn and himself. Depression, he decided, simply wasn’t allowed. March, after the snow melted, left the ground parched. April, as poets often wrote, was a fickle month. But in May—the month when Osborn died, in his prime—there was a sense of rehabilitation in the air. As any naturalist knew, death must always precede rebirth. When the May dandelions arrived, everything turned green, the migratory birds returned to New York, and the fields were filled with thistle and thine. “I just begin to realize it,” he wrote to his mother, who was traveling in Georgia, “the birds even are commencing to come back. While in the Park [Central Park] the other day I saw great numbers of robins, uttering their cheery notes from almost every grove. That winter had only just departed was evident from the number of little snowbirds (clad in black with white waist coats) which were about.”* 7

If any American writer caught Roosevelt’s attention in the 1870s it was Coues. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while John Tyler was president, Coues had lived a storybook life as a western man of science. During the Civil War he served at Fort Whipple, Arizona, as an assistant surgeon. Later he was appointed to Fort Randall, South Dakota, as a naturalist for the U.S. Northern Boundary Commission. Although he was considered one of the few top-rated surgeons west of the Mississippi River, Coues preferred writing wildlife books to performing tonsillectomies and amputations. His Key to North American Birds made him the heir apparent to Audubon. Although he served the Geological Survey of the Territories from 1876 to 1880 as a secretary and naturalist (under the supervision of F. V. Hayden), Coues eventually quit and returned to Arizona to document the amazing variety of migratory birds that wintered at such prime grounds as the Chiricahua Mountains and Patagonia Lake.8

Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have dizzied themselves trying to monitor their subject’s travels between Manhattan Island, Moosehead Lake, the Hudson River valley, the New Jersey Palisades, the Adirondacks, and Oyster Bay from 1874 to 1876, before he went to Harvard. Restless in the extreme, Roosevelt switched locales as regularly as a salesman or trail guide. In the two years before he entered Harvard, he tried to get away from West Fifty-Seventh Street on nature excursions as often as possible, usually alone. Instead of Osborn, Coues’s Key was his new companion, and he religiously followed the books’ systematic standards of trinomial nomenclature (taxonomic classification of subspecies).

Often, however, when he was studying foreign languages or arithmetic under the guidance of his tutor, Arthur Cutler, Roosevelt’s mind drifted to the Adirondack timberlands and the Long Island meadows, daydreaming about troops of new birds for his collection. Every time he could escape from Cutler’s apron strings, he made a beeline for Oyster Bay, part of the Eastern Flyway for migratory birds, eager to hear reedy wails and lovely carols. Whenever Cutler—who now prided himself on being headmaster of the Cutler School of New York—tried regimenting Theodore and getting him to focus on French or Greek, his prize student’s attention instead drifted to meditations on plebian robins and exotic waterbirds.9 “The study of Natural History was his chief recreation then as it continued to be,” Cutler recalled later. “He had an unusually large collection of birds and small animals; shot and mounted by himself and ranging in habitat from Egypt to the woods of Pennsylvania. In his excursions outside the city,