The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [70]
With Merriam’s glowing review in the Bulletin, Roosevelt was anointed an up-and-coming naturalist of the Ivy League and was listed in the 1877 Naturalists’ Directory. He had been accepted by the fraternity of scientists as one of their own.44 The Nuttall Ornithology Club—founded as recently as 1873—had said so. That was good enough for Roosevelt. Although Merriam hadn’t yet reached fame as perhaps the top U.S. government biologist of his generation, the fact that he saluted the Harvard sophomore in such a high-minded fashion won Roosevelt over. Thereafter, he would always hold Merriam in high regard. Nobody working in the Darwinian specimen collecting circuit, Roosevelt believed, knew more about North American wildlife than Merriam. Building on Roosevelt’s Summer Birds, Merriam, in fact, in 1881 published a better “Preliminary Life of the Birds of the Adirondacks.” It was his last foray with birds before his focus shifted to mammals.
Roosevelt followed up on the success of The Summer Birds with a set of profiles, drawn from his Oyster Bay notebooks, of the seventeen rarest birds he had encountered on the North Shore. Privately published in March 1879, while Roosevelt was backpacking in Maine, Notes on Some Birds of Oyster Bay, Long Island featured an unusual range of shorebirds, all listed with their Latin names. Some of his observations were new. Others were coeval with findings of Spencer F. Baird. Dive-bombing mockingbirds had a southern range, for example, but Roosevelt found one, imitating the vocalizations of half a dozen other species near the family’s country home, Tranquility. Four different species of warblers—prairie, golden-winged, pine, and Connecticut—were matter-of-factly included in Notes. But he was most clearly proud of having shot and collected two unusual species: a fish-crow, which constantly harassed gulls to relinquish their prey; and an Ipswich sparrow, which had been discovered by a farmer in 1872. “I shot an Ipswich sparrow on a strip of ice-rimmed beach,” he later wrote, “where the long coarse grass waved in front of a growth of blue berries, beach plums, and stunted pines.”45
Meanwhile, all of the rowing in Oyster Bay and hiking in the Adirondacks was starting to pay off for Roosevelt. He no longer looked like the weakling who’d been harassed by the youths of Moosehead Lake. Physical exertion was now part of his daily routine. He rowed on the Charles River, he did sit-ups and jumping-jacks, and he crammed as much activity into each and every hour as possible.
But all wasn’t well in the Roosevelt family. Theodore Sr. had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, which the New York Times then called a “Hopeless Disease.”46 Carefully, Theodore and his brothers and sisters monitored their father’s failing health, concerned about every chill and cough. He was clearly in deep pain, and his prognosis wasn’t good. During the Christmas season, Theodore was cautiously optimistic, elated that his father’s high temperature had returned to normal. Yet, as Corinne noted, all the “fearful suffering” was turning Theodore Sr. gray when he had “not a white hair before.”47
On Christmas day, Roosevelt listed all the birds and mammals he’d collected for his museum in 1877. For the first time, he included fish (fifty-two brook trout and 120 Atlantic mackerel). Many bird species were also inventoried; it was a strong year for snipes and herons. As for big game, he’d killed his first deer with a rifle. And he felt that much similar success lay ahead because his sick father had given him a double-barreled shotgun as a Christmas present. Just holding it, feeling its lead weight,