After a lifetime, the flitting glories still delight him, as do telling gestures, bits of song. A flash of red, a white-tipped tail, a spotted breast –that`s often all he gets; but all he needs. At 77, he still can hear the stratospheric squeak of a grasshopper sparrow–so high as to be undetectable to most ears–and despite two cataract operations, he still can tell a drab Tennessee warbler from a dingy orange-crowned warbler by the color of its eyebrows.
A Bachman`s warbler–now, that would be something to see.
”The rarest songbird in North America,” agrees the world`s premier birdman. ”I`ve tried for it and failed any number of times in Florida and Louisiana. It`s about four inches long, with yellow face and underparts, and black throat and crown patches. Maybe someday I`ll get lucky.”
Birds have their love-and-mating song; Their warning cry, their hating song, wrote E. B. White. Birds have their careless bough and teeter song; And, of course, their Roger Tory Peter song.
Roger Tory Peterson. Before he published a little handbook 52 years ago that has since ended up in six million homes and libraries worldwide, the best way to identify a bird was to murder it, take it in hand, and then consult a six-pound scientific tome and try to figure out what it was.
Peterson`s ”A Field Guide to the Birds” changed all that. Its creator has been called ”a hero to half of America,” and recently came to Chicago to receive the singular honor of having a bird named after him.
The man who almost singlehandedly popularized birdwatching is tall and lean, with a daggerlike beak and white crown patch. He calls himself a Swede, but actually resembles a great blue heron, particularly when he playfully crosses his eyes. His penetrating gaze, bookkeeper`s mind, and artistic skill have changed forever the way that millions of people view their world.
He can be stubborn, an unabashed one-upper, and unbelievably finicky. Yet with children and hobbyists he`s notoriously gentle and supportive. He is a master painter who prizes his photography, an honored photographer who prefers to write. He once set a record by identifying 235 species of birds in 24 hours (a friend since has spotted 330). He has seen or heard more than 4,000 of the nearly 9,000 species of birds in nature.
By ear alone he can label nearly every winged resident of North America
–”I know 750 species now. I`m OK, unless it`s some straggler from the Orient. I probably should have been a musician rather than an artist, but back when I was a boy, it was the girls who got the piano lessons.”
He has stupefied birders by identifying bird calls from a speeding car
–”`Ee-o-lay, pip-pip-pip-pip` . . . Hmmm. That`s a wood thrush.”– and when Harvard University scientists tested his hearing, they proclaimed him something of a freak. Friends like to tell how, at Cobbs Island, Va., they`d tramp out at dawn watching for birds while Peterson would stay snug abed, cock an ear to the high-spirited Handelian choruses outside his window, and win the tally.
”He can get 40 birds while standing in one spot when most people don`t even know there are 3 around,” says Ginny, his third wife (10 years and flying high) who watches over him like a mother wren. She also contributes her mapmaking and literary talents to the family empire.
It was the Field Museum of Natural History that recently lured the Petersons away from their 70-acre estate in the Connecticut woods (near the village of Old Lyme). During the Victorian heydey of bird identification, the Rev. John Bachman, naturalist and Audubon collaborator (Audubon married off two of his sons to Bachman`s daughters), did indeed get a warbler and the black oyster catcher named after him. But Peterson has earned himself an owl. A few years ago, a little cinammon-colored screech owl that no one knew existed was discovered flitting about at night in the perpetual fog of a subtropical forest in the Peruvian Andes. The scientists who netted the bird
–the Field Museum`s distinguished curator of birds, John Fitzpatrick, and his colleague, John O`Neill of Louisiana State University–have named it Peterson`s owl (Otus petersoni). And so it shall be known as long as there is man.
Some 133 different species of owls have been named so far, but this small predator with the warm, buffy-brown plumage that earns a living in the alpine mists delights its namesake no end:
”It is something I had never dreamed of,” he says. ”I have a friend who had a bird parasite named after him; but to have a proper bird, especially an owl, that is something!”
Friends these days are calling him ”Otus” (Latin for ”horned owl”), but Peterson`s favored nickname is ”The King Penguin,” referring to his insatiable quest for the favorite species that has lured him to Antarctica 19 times:
”Others see little clowns, ridiculous dwarfs, little people dressed in feathers. But they are far from that,” he believes. ”They are highly specialized birds dedicated to penguinism, a life molded by the cold, impersonal sea, harsh climate and the crowded colonies in which they reproduce.”
He ate a white-throated sparrow once, he confesses. ”It hit my window. I fixed it up. Just one bite. I wanted to know what it tasted like.” Another time, years back at Cape May, N.J., he forced himself to dine on sharp-shinned hawks rather than insult his hosts who had massacred them–”I was dining with the enemy, you see.”
Peterson`s shrewd system of identification helped change attitudes about birds. Peterson divided birds into logical groupings. He described them tersely. He provided meticulously accurate paintings of great freshness and beauty. And he devised tiny arrows that pointed out the ”field marks” that distinguish one bird from all others. The system revolutionized birdwatching
–”From Shotguns to Binoculars,” is the title of one of his standard talks.
”There`s a kind of joy to it,” he explains. ”Identification is a pleasure. But listing birds you`ve spotted is akin to golf–it`s sometimes called `ornitho-golfing.`
”There are real Arnold Palmers in birding,” he says. ”Supposing a woman in Austin, Tex., has a rare hummingbird from Mexico hanging around her feeder. You`ll grab a plane, fly down, identify it, and three hours later fly home. You`ve got it on your list. I`m over American 700 species now, along with only about 15 other birders. My greatest find was the ivory-billed woodpecker I spotted in the Louisiana backwoods in 1941; it supposedly was extinct. Our goal is to hit 800 species. It`s possible. In all, just over 850 have been recorded, sometimes only once, north of the Mexican border.”
In his world, you never, never lie.
”Usually, if you make one bad mistake, you`re dead. Birders know right away when there`s something fishy going on. Some fellows are trying to make a name for themselves. We`ve known such, and they`ve been spotted, and from then on, we just don`t believe them. They literally are blackballed.”
He was only 25 and teaching natural history at a Massachusetts prep school when he created his great descriptive guide. Pithy and portable, it brought people outdoors. Overnight, it overturned the whole concept of nature guides, streamlining the field identification of animals and plants.
There have since been 33 Peterson field guides naming and describing almost every aspect of nature. Such books are cited as the primary reason that 20 to 40 million Americans watch birds, a hundredfold increase over Audubon`s day.
An eager storyteller, Peterson recounts the time he anonymously tagged along on a field trip and–not unremarkably–got into an argument with a woman over a bird. As they bickered back and forth, she ordered him to stay put:
”You wait right here,” she said. ”I`ll go look it up in my Petey.”
No one can guess how many millions of children have been galvanized by this amiable Swede into a lifelong fascination with nature. By showing youngsters how to identify the exotic and melodic creatures that live right where they do, Peterson validated–and continues to validate–the beguiling discoveries that await in the back yard. The interest sparked by his guides, in fact, may even have modified migration behavior, as birds respond to people who put out food in winter.
Many conservationists credit the environmental movement–especially the use of birds as an early-warning system to predict trouble–to the awareness pioneered by Roger Tory Peterson. He has won virtually every major award in the field. Jimmy Carter gave him America`s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has received 16 honorary degrees and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As one museum said of him, ”Peterson has done more to interpret birds to people than even John James Audubon.”
A classic Peterson story (one that he doesn`t recall) illustrates his singlemindedness. Friends have reported how they and Peterson once went looking for shore birds. Included among the birders was Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Winston Churchill`s chief of imperial general staff during World War II. That evening, Alanbrooke fascinated the group by reminiscing about a wartime confrontation between Churchill and Josef Stalin as the titans argued strategy over a bottle of vodka. Everyone listened spellbound, except Peterson, who seemed in another world. When Alanbrooke finished, there was silence. Then Peterson spoke:
”You know,” he said, ”I guess those oyster catchers eat most any mollusk.”
As a boy growing up in Jamestown, Chautauqua County, N.Y., Peterson spent a lot of time idly rolling garbage cans down the streets. Then his 7th grade teacher, Blanche Hornbeck, formed a junior Audubon Club. She had the kids draw pictures of various birds, and gave Peterson a color plate of a blue jay to copy. It had been drawn by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the preeminent artist of the time, and still a Peterson favorite.
”That was the start for me,” he says. ”Birds became an obsession from which I`ve never freed myself. Sixty-five years later, I`m still terribly interested in blue jays. To many people, they`re pest birds, but not to me. A critic once said he`d rather have an obscure bird painted on toilet paper than a blue jay painted well. But let me tell you, it`s darned hard to paint a blue jay well.”
Peterson`s boyhood classmates couldn`t understand the passion that kept him in the woods in the dead of winter painting, drawing, and photographing the creatures that flocked to his 20 bird feeders. He was kidded a lot, and nearly 70 years later, still smarts.
”They called me `Nuts,` ” he recalls. ”That`s who I was–Nuts Peterson.
”That`s all changed now,” he`s pleased to report. ”I`ve been elected Jamestown`s most famous native. I won by two votes over Lucille Ball. I understand she complained about the count.”
Every naturalist has one electrifying moment when he first breaks through to another world. For Peterson it occurred during a hike through the woods of Swede Hill above Jamestown.
”We entered a grove of trees,” he says, ”and there on a branch was a flicker (a small woodpecker). I remember the day, April 8, 1920, about 9 in the morning. The bird obviously was asleep from migration, just a bundle of brown feathers. I thought it was dead.
”I poked it and all of a sudden, it jerked out its head, looked at me with startled eyes and flew away in a golden flash. What seemed dead was very much alive.
”It was, I think, that contrast–almost like the Resurrection–that touched me. It touched me so much that birds ever since have seemed to me the most vivid expression of life.”
The flicker vanished forever, but Peterson`s old 7th grade teacher did show up again years later. ”She was a little gray-haired lady of 70; when I knew her she was about 30 and had bright red hair. She never did get married. Anyway, I was lecturing in Cleveland and she introduced herself. She said she once had taken a course at Cornell and used my field guide. She didn`t know it was her own little boy who had written the book.”
Peterson sold his first drawing in 1922 when he was 13–a banded purple butterfly for a contest sponsored by the old Buffalo Times. He won $2, but ruined his father`s $5 gold fountain pen in the process. An original Peterson gallery painting now fetches as much as $50,000 when he finds time to do them. He says he never would have created his field guide if he had taken the traditional naturalist`s path and pursued biology, instead of studying art in New York. The guide brought him instant recognition and led to a 10-year stint with the National Audubon Society as education director and art editor. After the war, he struck out on his own. Peterson and his wife recently have been working 12-hour days completing more than 1,000 new paintings and 440 maps for the revised edition of the western field guide, its first update since 1961.
”Optical equipment is so much better nowadays that you can see the fleas on a phoebe,” he says, with some distress. ”I must retain the immediacy of fast identification in the guide, but I`ve also got to worry about the sophisticates and the critics.
”The birders are doing the reviews, and being a sensitive person who devotes a lot of years to this, I`ve got to forestall them. The first rule of birdsmanship is to get to your most likely critics first, not later. Once you`ve thanked them in the book, they`re not as quick to gore you.”
When he`s done with the massive project, Peterson has six more books waiting to be written. All his memorabilia eventually will go to the new Roger Tory Peterson Institute, to be built within a few years in his home town. Funded by $2.5 million in foundation grants, with another $8 million to be raised, the institute hopes through proper care and feeding to lure the world`s top-flight naturalists to Jamestown to teach the science of nature.
When Peterson is not working or birding, he seeks the company of colleagues. A lot of great bird artists have come along since his guide, he jokes.
”Unlike other artists, they`re not competitive, but a very sharing group. Art these days seems have to gone into subconscious comment and abstraction, which I can understand to a point. But I wouldn`t want my subconscious to be put on exhibit, because it`s very questionable. So most of us bird artists are realists, and that`s fine. We can do realism a thousand different ways.
”I recently heard someone say how extraordinary it is that this narrow focus of birds is so well represented. I got miffed. I thought, well, homo sapiens is one species; the birds are at least 8,600. How can you call it narrow?
”We tend to think of them collectively–man`s here and they`re out there. But I`m interested in the whole of nature, in anything living. When it comes to the other species, we tend to ignore them.
”I`ve always thought that was too bad.”
