The REAL bird man of the entire 20th Century

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, birds, painting, writing, collections

Roger Tory Peter with his painting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which he knew from firsthand experience. (Photo by Virginia M. Peterson, on p.120 of All Things Reconsidered)

I grew up with a succession of the "Peterson Field Guides" either in my room or in the family book room down the hall. Though not an avid bird watcher, I have enjoyed occasional rambles through this field, desert, or mountainside with an appropriate field guide and binoculars in hand, usually with one friend, seldom more than one, and seldom alone.

I did not pay much attention to who Mr. Peterson was. I was clear he knew more about birds than anyone I was likely to meet. I was just happy for his clear method of quick identification, as I am far from a careful observer, and cannot sketch at all. I just look, that's about it.

How happy I was to find a book with forty-two of his essays from The Bird Watcher's Digest, edited by the journal's editor, Bill Thompson III: All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures. Therein I found that Peterson was not just a field guide designer and illustrator for some sixty years, but an excellent painter of larger works, an avid (he says "obsessive") photographer, and a lucid, engaging writer. He has as well carried much of the heavy freight for the cause of conservation from the 1930s until he passed away in 1996.

The picture shown above is from the chapter titled "Finding the Ivory-billed Woodpecker" (the chapters are not numbered). He is one of a very few field guide illustrators to have seen and heard ivory-bills.

An inkling of the range of his interests is the prior chapter, "Orgy on Delaware Bay", about the mass egg-laying of horseshoe crabs and the great variety of birds and other creatures that feed on the eggs. That chapter ends with his advice to pay a visit to Moore's Landing on the full moon in May (June will work also), to see the spectacle, "this mystical conjunction of planetary and biological forces."

The world came close to losing him many years ago, when he visited a guano rock offshore of Argentina, to see the bird rookery there. Getting there, in a hired rowboat, was easy. An offshore wind that continually strengthens during the day, a foehn off the Andes, made the return nearly impossible! He closes that chapter, "High Seas in a Rowboat", "To take a chance once in a while and to get away with it is to feel alive."

Two other favorites chapters: "Memories of Manhattan", a lyrical evocation of the great hordes of migratory birds that visited Central Park in pre-WW2 times—though reduced, the spectacle is frequently similar today—; and "Long After Columbus", in which he asserts that the Endangered Species Act has done more harm than good (developers get a window of opportunity between "study" and "listing", which they all too often take tragic advantage of), and that while a few species have been lost, many more are benefited by human activities. Still, he acknowledges that we must keep watch, for not all activities are beneficial, and he is justly proud of his part in getting DDT banned in the 1960s.

Peterson the Polymath reveals himself to us in these wonderful columns. This book is a treasure.