ROOSEVELT AND WILD LIFE 



By Mr. Edmund Heller 

 Naturalist, Roosevelt African Expedition 



The Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station, the Memo- 

 rial to Theodore Roosevelt, is just the sort of memorial which he 

 would have approved. There was ever present in Roosevelt a keen 

 interest in wild life, primarily an interest in the habits and actions 

 of animals, in their family life, and in the way they carried on the 

 struggle for existence. Throughout his life in the hunting field 

 he was an enthusiastic observer of animal behavior, a far keener 

 one than most of our expert naturalists. Nothing would have 

 brought more joy to Roosevelt's heart than the establishment of a 

 Wild Life Experiment Station such as you have, where animals 

 can be studied free from artificial conditions. 



Roosevelt contended for many years that faunal or field natural 

 history studies were fully as important a feature of natural history 

 as closet or laboratory investigations. At the present time nearly all 

 naturalists are of this opinion, but during Roosevelt's youth, when 

 he was a student at college, the field naturalist was considered a 

 very superficial sort of investigator, and this deprecatory attitude 

 kept Roosevelt from taking up faunal natural history as his life 

 work. Today, however, all naturalists are agreed that animals react 

 normally only in their natural or wild environment, and any observa- 

 tions that may be made in the laboratory must be verified in the 

 field before they can be accepted as normal or characteristic of a 

 particular species. Roosevelt emphasized the idea that the real 

 laboratory in which to test theories and study animal behavior is the 

 great out-of-doors, the field, where all life is struggling for existence 

 and exhibiting its characteristics for our observation and study. 



Colonel Roosevelt may be said to have introduced the term 

 " faunal naturalist " to the public through his natural history writ- 

 ings. He demonstrated in his African expedition what a marvelous 

 faunal naturalist he was by acquiring a great mass of new observa- 

 tions on the life histories of the animals with which he met. Roose- 

 velt was a practical faunal naturalist who had scant sympathy for 

 mere theories in zoology. As an instance of this may be cited his 

 application of the protective coloration theories of certain modern 

 naturalists to the actual field conditions as he found them in Africa 



[50] 



