Recreation | Page 6

come to hear are far more ancient. They must be the same songs that were heard by the inhabitants of England before the Romans came, for the songs of birds come down unchanged through great antiquity, and we are listening to-day, in whatever part of the world we may be, to songs which must have been familiar to races of men of which history has no knowledge and no record.
I was a little apprehensive about this walk. I had had no personal acquaintance with Colonel Roosevelt before he came to England in 1910, and I thought to myself, "Perhaps, after all, he will not care so very much about birds, and possibly after an hour or so he will have had enough of them. If that be so and he does not care for birds, he will have nothing but my society, which he will not find sufficiently interesting for so long a time." I had relied upon the birds to provide entertainment for him. If that failed, I doubted my own resources. I need have had no fear about his liking for birds. I found, not only that he had a remarkable and abiding interest in birds, but a wonderful knowledge of them. Though I know something about British birds I should have been lost and confused among American birds, of which unhappily I know little or nothing. Colonel Roosevelt not only knew more about American birds than I did about British birds, but he knew about British birds also. What he had lacked was an opportunity of hearing their songs, and you cannot get a knowledge of the songs of birds in any other way than by listening to them.
We began our walk, and when a song was heard I told him the name of the bird. I noticed that as soon as I mentioned the name it was unnecessary to tell him more. He knew what the bird was like. It was not necessary for him to see it. He knew the kind of bird it was, its habits and appearance. He just wanted to complete his knowledge by hearing the song. He had, too, a very trained ear for bird songs, which cannot be acquired without having spent much time in listening to them. How he had found time in that busy life to acquire this knowledge so thoroughly it is almost impossible to imagine, but there the knowledge and training undoubtedly were. He had one of the most perfectly trained ears for bird songs that I have ever known, so that if three or four birds were singing together he would pick out their songs, distinguish each, and ask to be told each separate name; and when farther on we heard any bird for a second time, he would remember the song from the first telling and be able to name the bird himself.
He had not only a trained ear, but keen feeling and taste for bird songs. He was quick to express preferences, and at once picked out the song of the English blackbird as being the best of the bird songs we heard. I have always had the same feeling about the blackbird's song. I do not say it is better than the songs of American birds, which I have not heard, and I think Colonel Roosevelt thought one or two of the American bird songs were better than anything we had in England; but his feeling for the English blackbird's song I found confirmed the other day in a book published by Dr. Chapman, of the Natural History Museum at New York. He has written a chapter on English birds and picks out the song of the blackbird for excellence because of its "spiritual quality." Colonel Roosevelt liked the song of the blackbird so much that he was almost indignant that he had not heard more of its reputation before. He said everybody talked about the song of the thrush; it had a great reputation, but the song of the blackbird, though less often mentioned, was much better than that of the thrush. He wanted to know the reason of this injustice and kept asking the question of himself and me. At last he suggested that the name of the bird must have injured its reputation. I suppose the real reason is that the thrush sings for a longer period of the year than the blackbird and is a more obtrusive singer, and that so few people have sufficient feeling about bird songs to care to discriminate.
One more instance I will give of his interest and his knowledge. We were passing under a fir tree when we heard a small song in the tree above us. We stopped and I said that was the song of a golden-crested wren. He listened very