Date: 4/28/25 9:21 am From: Stephen Greenfield <tapaculo47...> Subject: Re: [mou-net] MOU-NET Digest - 25 Apr (Roger Tory Peterson)
Thanks for sharing, Gordon.
When my brother and I were growing up, Peterson was our inspiration, and his 1947 field guide about the closest thing we had to a bible. I later got a copy of the original 1934 edition referred to here; its illustrations are even more simplified than the later one, thus focusing even more on the way one actually sees birds in the field, and what is important for identifying them. In addition to his art, his descriptions of behavior and calls are epic: "The Henslow's [Sparrow] perches atop a weed, from which is gives utterance to one of the poorest vocal efforts of any bird; throwing back its head, it ejects a hicoughing 'tsi-lick',..."
His final edition seemed like an effort to show he could be as good an artist as anyone, but I never liked it as much.
The team of my first Christmas Bird Count - in Old Lyme CT - consisted of myself and kid brother... and RTP! I was invited through a connection at my college. Coincidentally, Tory Peterson was also at Wesleyan at the time, but he was not a birder. I often mention that to parents who haven't - along with myself - failed to get their children to be birders... they they shouldn't feel bad, since the first birding millionaire couldn't manage it either!
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From: Minnesota Birds on behalf of MOU-NET automatic digest system
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2025 12:00 AM
To: <MOU-NET...>
Subject: MOU-NET Digest - 25 Apr 2025 to 27 Apr 2025 (#2025-46)
Topics of the day:
1. Roger Tory Peterson and the origin of the field guide to N American birds
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:18:15 +0000
From: Gordon Andersson <gpandersson...>
Subject: Roger Tory Peterson and the origin of the field guide to N American birds
From The Writer's Almanac for this date in history.
"It was on this day in 1934 that A Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson was published. The son of Swedish and German immigrants, Peterson grew up in Jamestown, a struggling industrial town near the western border of New York state. He was a smart boy, and he skipped two grades. He didn't fit in well with his older classmates, who made fun of him for his obsession with wildlife - they called him "Professor Nuts Peterson." His seventh-grade teacher encouraged him to join the Junior Audubon Club, and this began a lifelong passion for birds. On a field trip, he wandered into the woods with a friend, and they saw a flicker that they thought was dead. He wrote: "When I reached out to touch its back it exploded with life - a stunning sight, flying away with its golden underwings and the red crescent on its nape -I can see it now - the way it was transformed from what we thought was death into intense life. I was tremendously excited with the feeling which I have carried ever since, of the intensity of a bird's life, and its apparent freedom, with this wonderful ability to fly."
Peterson's mother had always encouraged his fascination with nature - she made him nets to catch butterflies and convinced the local druggist to give the boy cyanide for preserving insects. But his father was skeptical of his son's passion and hoped that he would go to work in a local mill after he graduated from high school, which is exactly what happened. Peterson graduated at the age of 16 and went to work at the Union National Furniture Company, where he was paid $8 a week. His job was to paint Chinese scenes on lacquered wooden cabinets. His manager was impressed by Peterson's artistic skills and told the boy that he should go to art school, not waste his talent at a furniture company.
That same year, Peterson was reading an ornithology magazine at the library, and he saw a notice for the next meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union at a natural history museum in New York City. Part of the meeting would include a show of bird art, and Peterson submitted two paintings. They were both accepted, and so at the age of 17 his work was shown alongside the best bird illustrators in the country.
After two years of working at the mill, Peterson took off for New York City for art school and then got a job teaching science at a private school for boys, in Boston. There, he joined the country's oldest ornithological group, called the Nuttall Club. He also began working on a bird guide with a new system for identification - grouping species with similar characteristics and using arrows to point out the differences between them. He submitted it to New York City publishers but was repeatedly turned down. He discovered that a fellow member of the Nuttall Club named Francis Allen was an editor at Houghton Mifflin, so he took the manuscript to him. Allen was impressed. To make sure that Peterson's illustrations were accurate, Allen took the manuscript to a Harvard ornithology professor and asked him to identify the species from across the room. The professor had no trouble doing so, and Houghton Mifflin agreed to publish A Field Guide to the Birds.
Since printing full-color plates was expensive, Houghton Mifflin printed just 2,000 copies, which cost $2.75 each. To make sure they wouldn't lose too much money if the book was a flop, Peterson's contract stated that he would not receive any royalties on the first thousand books, and 10 cents per copy on the second thousand. A Field Guide to the Birds sold out its first printing in one week. By Peterson's death in 1996, more than 7 million copies had been sold."
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GAndersson
St Paul
