y streaked with black, which has
puzzled me. Doubtless it is a very common kind which has for the
moment slipped my memory. I saw the Blackburnian, the summer
yellowbird, and the black-throated green." The next day he wrote me
that he had identified the puzzling warbler; it was the Cape May.
There is a tradition among newspaper men in Washington that a Cape May
warbler once broke up a Cabinet meeting; maybe this was that identical
bird.

At luncheon he told us of some of his ornithological excursions in the
White House grounds, how people would stare at him as he stood gazing
up into the trees like one demented. "No doubt they thought me
insane." "Yes," said Mrs. Roosevelt, "and as I was always with him,
they no doubt thought I was the nurse that had him in charge."

In his "Pastimes of an American Hunter" he tells of the owls that in
June sometimes came after nightfall about the White House. "Sometimes
they flew noiselessly to and fro, and seemingly caught big insects on
the wing. At other times they would perch on the iron awning bars
directly overhead. Once one of them perched over one of the windows
and sat motionless, looking exactly like an owl of Pallas Athene."

He knew the vireos also, and had seen and heard the white-eyed at his
Virginia place, "Pine Knot," and he described its peculiar, emphatic
song. As I moved along with the thought of this bird in mind and its
snappy, incisive song, as I used to hear it in the old days near
Washington, I fancied I caught its note in a dense bushy place below
us. We paused to listen. "A catbird," said the President, and so we
all agreed. We saw and heard a chewink. "Out West the chewink calls
like a catbird," he observed. Continuing our walk, we skirted the edge
of an orchard. Here the President called our attention to a
high-hole's nest in a cavity of an old apple tree. He rapped on the
trunk of the tree that we might hear the smothered cry for food of the
young inside. A few days before he had found one of the half-fledged
young on the ground under the tree, and had managed to reach up and
drop it back into the nest. "What a boiling there was in there," he
said, "when the youngster dropped in!"

A cuckoo called in a tree overhead, the first I had heard this season.
I feared the cold spring had cut them off. "The yellow-billed,
undoubtedly," the President observed, and was confirmed by Mr. Childs.
I was not certain that I knew the call of the yellow-billed from that
o