For the Birds: Review of Roger Tory Peterson Biography

All students of nature are familiar with the name Roger Tory Peterson. Peterson is given much credit for the rise of field birding in this country and abroad. In 1934, he published his Field Guide to Eastern Birds. This book was a vast improvement over earlier identification guides to birds that were too bulky for field use, sparsely illustrated or incomplete in their coverage. Peterson’s guide was meant to be taken in the field. In later years, Peterson was always delighted to be asked to sign battered, well-used copies of his guide because that meant the field guide was used as he intended.

Peterson was innovative in painting birds from the same perspective, usually a lateral view looking to the right. The male was typically shown in front with the female partially overlapping behind the male. Perhaps his most useful innovation was the use of arrows to point to characteristics that are most useful in identifying species. His text descriptions were to the point and easy to understand. For instance, to identify the Snowy Egret he told the birder to look for the golden slippers.

Over the years, Peterson revised his eastern bird guide three times and a fifth edition was completed posthumously by colleagues. He also produced bird guides for western North America, Mexico, Europe as well as a wildflower guide. He painted the illustrations for all of these guides. For this 1980 revision of his eastern bird guide, he painted very bird anew. His publisher, Houghton-Mifflin, used these books a starting point for the Peterson Field Guide series. Specialists in other groups of organisms prepared field guides using the Peterson arrow system. I am sure you have seen these guides on such diverse groups as ferns, trees, reptiles and amphibians, butterflies, and mammals.

Peterson’s contributions to birds went far beyond the field guides. In his nearly 88 years of life, Peterson was an educator, photographer and conservationists as well as a popularizer of birds. His accomplishments can be appreciated by reading the newly published first biography of Peterson written by Elizabeth Rosenthal. The book is titled “Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson” and it is a gem.

Rosenthal dug deeply in her exploration of this rather complicated man. She interviewed well over 100 people including this two sons from his second marriage, borrowed letters from a number of Peterson’s correspondents, scoured the archives of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Peterson’s hometown of Jamestown, New York and mined the literature for information on Peterson.

Rosenthal chronicles formative events in Peterson’s childhood and early adulthood, including his joining the Bronx Bird Club, a loosely organized group of boys and young men with keen interests in birds. Peterson had moved to New York City to take some design courses to hone his artistic skills and discovered this club. Several of the club members went on to distinguished careers in ornithology and wildlife biology.

Through a series of events, Peterson taught at the Chewonki School in Wiscasset, Maine where he began the strong interest in nature study there at persists to this day. Peterson also regularly participated as a leader at the fledgling National Audubon Society camp on Hog Island in Maine during summers in the mid 1930’s.

Rather than providing a strictly chronological account of Peterson’s life, Rosenthal covers his adult with a number of thematic chapters. Chapters overlap broadly. I think of each chapter as a layer of Peterson’s life. By the end of the book, the reader has a good understanding of the man’s accomplishments, ambitions and personality.

I knew about Peterson’s cross-country trip with the British ornithologist, James Fisher in 1953, chronicled in the book “Wild America”. I did not know that a tour guide, Gus Yaki, recreated the trip 30 years later and that Peterson joined portions of that tour. That is the mark of an influential person.

We learn that Peterson was not a confrontational man but held strong views about the importance of bird conservation. We learn of his efforts to protect the million flamingos that use Lake Nakuru in Kenya, the diverse Coto Donana region in Spain and early efforts to sound the alarm about the negative impacts of DDT on birds and other animals. He played a major role in the development of the World Wildlife Fund.

We discover that Peterson had his share of human foibles. He was a poor driver and a forgetful person. His concentration on his painting and his travels once he became a celebrity came at the cost of his family life.

By the end of his life, Peterson had been awarded 21 honorary doctorates and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. By reading Rosenthal’s biography, you will understand why.

[Originally published on October 18, 2008]