cutting its throat. So when, with moslem 
followers, one shoots anything, someone 
generally rushes forward with a knife to 
kill the animal before it is quite dead. 
When one shoofS a rhino, however, no 
gallant man rushes forward to perform 
this rite whilst the animal is still kicking. 
Either the throat is cut after death, or 
it is not cut at all. In the latter event 
they eat the meat all the same saying that 
the rule doeS' not apply, as the rhino has 
no neck to speak of. 
O NCE, whilst marching some distance 
ahead of my caravan, I shot one of 
these animals. After ascertaining 
that it was quite dead I went up to it, 
caught hold of its horn and then called to 
my men to come and finish it. Some of 
them, seeing me close to the body, came 
up with knives prepared to go through 
the farce of cutting the animal’s throat 
and pretending that it was still alive. As 
they came near I jerked the head up and 
let it fall back on the ground calling out 
“Hurry up, I can’t hold him much longer.” 
Whereupon they retired hastily. 
The anterior horn is curved backwards 
and is much longer than the posterior. I 
have, however, seen a rhino on which the 
back horn stood some inches higher than 
the front and must have been about 
twenty inches — a most unusual length. 
The horns of the female are much more 
slender than those of the male and some- 
times attain great length, although more 
often this slender horn gets broken — it 
then wears down into a short and stumpy 
one giving little indication of having been 
once much longer. The broken part of 
the horn is gradually worn into a point, 
sometimes by being systematically ground 
on a stone. 
The rhino has on each foot three toes. 
each provided with a hoof, or broad nail, 
which cuts into the surface of the ground 
and makes the spoor very distinctive. The 
middle toe faces forward and the side toes 
outward. The whole spoor looks like 
the outline of the top of a man’s head 
with large ears on each side. The track 
of the hind foot is, like that of nearly all 
animals, narrower than the fore. The 
spoor is much the same size as that of a 
hippo but cannot be confused with it as 
the latter has pointed toe nails. 
Some African natives are wonderful at 
tracking and bushcraf t in their own par- 
ticular localities but, as their skill is the 
result of instinct rather than conscious 
thought and effort, they are quite hopeless 
if taken out of the country they know. 
In Uganda proper, that is the part of 
the Uganda protectorate in which the 
Baganda live, there are no rhino. I took 
(CONTINUED ON PACE 626) 
ROOSEVELT AS A STUDENT OF BIRDS' 
FEW MEN HAVE POSSESSED HIS BREADTH OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE HABITS 
CHARACTERISTICS AND LIFE HISTORIES OF OUR MANY FEATHERED FRIENDS 
By JOHN M. PARKER , 
I 
I 
T heodore roosevelt was, and 
had been from early boyhood, a 
close student of bird life. He was 
an indefatigable reader of books about 
birds, and what he thus learned he veri- 
fied and supplemented by personal ob- 
servation. He was amazingly well-posted 
as to their life habits, the manner of 
their nesting, the forms of the nests and 
the way the feathered creatures reared 
their young. Few men I have ever met 
have had his breadth of knowledge of 
the habits and characteristics of birds, 
and he never lost an opportunity of ad- 
ding to that knowledge, carefully jot- 
ting down in a memorandum book for 
future reference 
any details which 
interested him. 
On one of the 
numerous occasions 
when it was my 
privilege to have 
him for a guest we 
were making a 
camping trip along 
the Gulf Coast of 
Mississippi 
andLouisiana. Here 
there was a wealth 
of bird-life which 
offered to the Col- 
onel free scope for 
his hobby and kept 
him as delighted as 
a boy with a new 
toy. I remember 
well his tremend- 
ous enthus- 
iasm over what 
was, in truth, a re- 
markable sight — a 
colony of Royal 
Terns we encoun- 
tered one day 
which must have 
embraced, I should 
fay, as many as 
100,000 nests. Some of the small islands 
or shell-keys were so thickly covered with 
bird nests that it was a difficult matter 
to walk without stepping on them. Yet 
in spite of the vast number of these 
birds, each old one seemed able to in- 
stantly identify not only its nest, but its 
young birds. 
All of this section is now under Gov- 
ernment protection, and about the mid- 
dle of June, either late in the evening 
or early in the morning, one may see 
the air filled with the white-winged gulls 
feeding their young on minnows, and 
even more wonderful, during the heat of 
the day see some of these small islands. 
looking at a distance like a white sheet, 
since, when the birds are young, the old 
ones stand over them with outspread 
wings to protect them both from the 
sun and the rain. 
V ERY early one morning we were’ 
walking over the divided end of the 
Chandaleur Islands, and the Col-! 
onel stopped suddenly and said, “ByJ 
Jove! What is this?” ' 
Captain Spreckle, the warden of the 
bird islands, told us they were two coon 
traps. A very large coon had been 
caught by its foreleg in the trap and had 
chewed the leg off in order to escape. In 
the other trap a 
second large coon 
had been caught 
and had chewed its 
hind leg off in or- 
der to escape from 
the trap. The Cap- 
tain told us that 
these two coons 
were the only ones 
left on the island, 
and while their 
tracks were very 
pilainly visible, the 
keepers had never 
been able to retrap 
them or get a 
chance to shoot 
them before they 
slipped into the 
marsh grass and 
brush which sur- 
rounded the place. 
He was very proud 
of the fact that 
they had succeeded 
almost completely 
in freeing the 
island of one of the 
worst pests for 
(CONTINUED ON 
PAGE 627)j 
John M. Pa rker and Theodore R oosevelt on their way to the bird sanctuaries 
