Charles Kellogg's Travel-Log

Charles Kellogg (1868-1949) could sing like a bird. Literally. At least that's the story, and the Humboldt Redwoods State Park Visitor Center is sticking to it. Kellogg would stand in front of an audience, open his mouth, and out would come an aviary of bird-calls. He claimed to have the larynx of a bird (called a syrinx). NPR's Ketzel Levine tells Kellogg's story as the first part of her series, Big Trees and the Lives They've Changed.

Kellogg maintained that physicists measured his voice with a tuning fork, and discovered it could vibrate up to 40,000 cycles per second. Compare that with the upper range of the human voice — around 500 cycles per second — and you get some idea of just how high the pitch of his voice might have been. If true, Kellogg would have been capable of producing sounds inaudible to the human ear!

Though a consummate performer — he traveled at home and abroad doing vaudeville-style tricks with his voice — Kellogg had a mission. He was a humanitarian and a naturalist who wanted, he wrote, "To awaken interest in the great redwood forests of California, and to assist in their preservation." His lasting legacy is The Travel Log, the world's first mobile home, hand-hewn from a chunk of fallen redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), and mounted on the back of a 1917 Nash Quad truck.