vi Birds Every Child Should Know 



afar the distress caws of a company of crows 

 and away he goes to be sure that their perse- 

 cutor is a hawk. A faint tattoo in the woods 

 sends him climbing up a tall straight tree with 

 the confident expectation of finding a wood- 

 pecker's nest within the hole in its side. 



While training his ears, Nature is also training 

 every muscle in his body, sending him on long 

 tramps across the fields in pursuit of a new bird 

 to be identified, making him run and jump 

 fences and wade brooks and climb trees with the 

 zest that produces an appetite like a saw-mill's 

 and deep sleep at the close of a happy day. 



When President Roosevelt was a boy he was 

 far from strong, and his anxious father and 

 mother naturally encouraged every interest 

 that he showed in out-of-door pleasures. Among 

 these, perhaps the keenest that he had was in 

 birds. He knew the haunts of every species 

 within a wide radius of his home and made a 

 large collection of eggs and skins that he pre- 

 sented to the Smithsonian Museum when he 

 could no longer endure the evidences of his 

 "youthful indiscretion," as he termed the col- 

 lector's mania. But those bird hunts that 

 had kept him happily employed in the open air 

 all day long, helped to make him the strong, 

 manly man he is, whose wonderful physical 

 endurance is not the least factor of his greatness. 

 No one abhors the killing of birds and the rob- 



