Birding with Teddy Roosevelt

THE HERMIT THRUSH IS A COMPACT BIRD, a snowball with big eyes topped with feathers the color of sugar-maple bark dappled in sunlight. It isn’t revered because of its looks, which camouflage it in a dense Adirondack forest. Its song, on the other hand, is ethereal and catching. Sixteen-year-old Theodore Roose velt, hunting not far from Paul Smith’s Hotel in August 1875, was bowled over by this music, an unexpected gift after hours of fruitlessly searching for deer.

It was night, the moon not yet visible in the reflection of the small lake nearby. The evening felt oppressively quiet, the hoot of an owl or the laughter of a loon made deafening in contrast, and the looming pines on the other edge of the water were a blotch of soaking dark. But then the silence was pierced by a few spare notes “from the depths of the grim and rugged woods until the sweet, sad music seemed to fill the very air, and to conquer for a moment the gloom of the night; then it died away, and ceased as suddenly as it had begun.”

This observation is found in one, so adolescently presumptuous that you wonder if he imagined one day presenting his vacation findings to hordes of mustachioed men tying flies and vigorously nodding. “Perhaps the song would have seemed less sweet in the daytime,” he added, “but uttered as it was, with such surroundings, sounding so strange, and so beautiful amid those grand but desolate wilds, I shall never forget it.”