The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [69]
Sticking to straightforward scientific observation, Roosevelt, perhaps fearful of being trivialized as a populizer, edited his most poetic journal writing out of The Summer Birds. Here, for example, was a journal passage from June 23, 1877, that he apparently deemed too fanciful to include in his booklet. The “we” in the following journal entry refers to Minot, Sawyer, and himself:
Perhaps the sweetest bird music I ever listened to was uttered by a hermit thrush. It was while hunting deer on a small lake, in the heart of the wilderness; the night was dark, for the moon had not yet risen, but there were clouds…. I could distinguish dimly the outlines of the gloomy and impenetrable pine forests by which we were surrounded. We had been out for two or three hours but had seen nothing; once we heard a tree fall with a dull, heavy crash, and two or three times the harsh hooting of an owl had been answered by the unholy laughter of a loon from the bosom of the lake, but otherwise nothing had occurred to break the death-like stillness of the night; not even a breath of air stirred among the tops of the tall pine trees.40
Theodore spent the rest of his summer rowing around Long Island, discussing birds with his father, and preparing his little book for publication. Roosevelt considered it his highest intellectual achievement to date, proof that he had learned “how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.”41 By the time Roosevelt returned to Harvard in September 1877 for his sophomore year, he was ruddy-cheeked, bronzed, hardened, and strangely handsome, and his asthma was in remission. In October a few hundred copies of The Summer Birds were printed. He received accolades from scholars—an important development in enhancing his self-confidence as a naturalist. At the time bird lists for specific locations were considered very important, as national data were just starting to be collected seriously.
No less a personage than Dr. C. Hart Merriam, in fact, a graduate of Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School, embraced Roosevelt with open arms in the April 1878 Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club (the house organ for the first organization in North America devoted to ornithology). It was the list’s accuracy that impressed Dr. Merriam, who had just published his own Birds of Connecticut. “By far the best of these recent [bird] lists which I have seen is that of The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y.., by Theodore Roosevelt and H. D. Minot,” Dr. Merriam wrote. “Though not redundant with information and mentioning but 97 species, it bears prima facie evidence of reliability—which seems to be a great desideratum in birds lists nowadays.”42
Although the down-to-earth Merriam was only three years older than Roosevelt, he was already a legend among naturalists. Born in Locust Grove, New York, on December 5, 1855, Merriam spent much of his childhood exploring the Adirondacks and hunting mammals with bow and arrow. Like Roosevelt, Merriam had put together his own wildlife museum as a boy. Hart’s mother, objecting to the stench of dead rabbits and squirrels, hired an old army surgeon to teach him taxidermy. Using corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid as his preservatives, young Merriam became something of a prodigy at his craft. In 1871 Hart’s father, a U.S. congressman from New York, playing the role of promoter and coach, took his son to meet Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Once Baird saw the boy’s work he was awestruck; every specimen of bird or mammal was perfectly embalmed. Even the mounted butterflies and grasshoppers were first-rate. That same year Merriam struck up a correspondence with John Muir regarding glaciation in Yosemite Valley.
Worried that he couldn’t make a living at ornithology, Merriam, whose expertise on the subject of small mammals and fauna led to an assignment by the Hayden Survey classifying animal populations in Yellowstone National Park, was a prodigy who at age seventeen