ROOSEVELT -MY LIFE AS A NATURALIST 



3-^5 



some, even although of a negative kind ; 

 for the great majority of observers 

 seem quite unable to see, to reeord, or 

 to understand facts so obvious that they 

 leap to the eye. ]\Iy two ornithologists 

 ottered a ease in point as regards the 

 chats: and 1 shall shortly speak of one 

 or two other cases, as, for example, the 

 cougar and the saddle-backed lecliwi. 



After returning to this country and 

 until 1 was hall'wny througli college, 1 

 continued to obscrxc and collect in the 

 fashion of the ordinary boy who is in- 

 terested in natural history. 1 made 

 copious and valueless notes. As J saitl 

 above, 1 did not see and observe very 

 keenly; later it interested and rather 

 chagrined me to Hnd out how much 

 more C. Hart Merriam and John Bur- 

 roughs saw when 1 went out with them 

 near Washington or in the Yellowstone 

 Park : or how much more George K. 

 Cherrie and Leo E. jMiller and Ed- 

 mund Heller and Edgar A. Mearns and 

 my own son Kermit saw in Africa and 

 South America, on the trips I took to 

 the Xyanza lakes and across the Bra- 

 zilian hinterland. 



During the years when as a boy I 

 "collected specimens'" at Oyster Bay or 

 in the north woods, my contributions to 

 original research were of minimum 

 worth — they were limited to occasional 

 records of such birds as the dominica 

 warbler at Oyster Bay. or to seeing a 

 duck hawk work havoc in a loose gang 

 of night herons, or to noting the blood- 

 thirsty conduct of a captive mole shrew 

 — I think I sent an account of the last 

 incident to C. Hart Alerriam. I occa- 

 sionally sent to some small ornitholog- 

 ical publication a local list of Adiron- 

 dack birds or something of the sort : 

 and then proudly kept reprinted copies 

 of the list on my desk until they grew 

 dog-eared and then disappeared. I 

 lived in a region zoologically so well 

 known that the obvious facts had all 

 been set forth already, and as I lacked 

 the power to find out the things that 

 were not obvious, mv work merelv 



paralli'led the similar work of hundreds 

 of other young collectors who had a 

 very good time but who made no par- 

 ticular addition to the sum of human 

 knowledge. 



Among my boy friends who cared for 

 ornithology was a fine and manly 



We found that the gerenuk {Lithocranius wal- 

 leri, specimen from the Northern Guaso Nyiro), a 

 small, long-necked antelope {the natives call it 

 "little camel" or "little giraffe" ), has habits differ- 

 ent from other African antelopes. It rises on its 

 hind legs to browse from the thorn trees, and 

 when alarmed skulks away or hides with its neck 

 stretched out on the ground. It is the only 

 African game animal about wliich we gained no 

 proof wliatever that it ever drinks — and it lives 

 under almost desert conditions. The gerenuk is 

 rare in British East Africa and so extremely 

 wild and wary that it was with difficulty any 

 specimens were collected 



