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- 
