Roger Tory Peterson (1908 – 1996)

In public school, in the early 1950s, a few kids tried to bully me, one especially, named David Sniderman, who loved to threaten me with his switchblade knife and thumbtacks fired through a pea shooter, as well as simply pound me with his fists.  He travelled with a retinue of little thugs aspiring to the ranks of Blackboard Junglesque juvenile delinquency.

But there was another boy with a tough reputation whose parents advised their children to avoid, named David McKinnon, and he became my defender once we discovered a shared passion for birds. One day David M. phoned me to say there was a freshly dead bird in the gutter in front of his house, about three blocks from my own. Would I like to see it?  I jumped on my bike and was there as fast as I could peddle. The tiny bird was on a mat of fallen leaves, limply lifeless but very fresh. As sad as I was that the bird was dead, I was also enchanted by the delicate perfection of the tiny creature’s being. Patterns and colors were so beautifully harmonized, so utterly perfect.  But what species was it?  “I have something might help,” David replied, as he ran back to his house. 

David returned with a book small enough to fit into a jacket pocket and it was filled with illustrations, some in color, some in black and white, but most of them showing birds drawn as I had never seen them portrayed, in neat rows, identically posed, with black lines pointing to various features which, I would soon learn, were called field marks.  These were colors and patterns on a bird that would distinguish it from another very similar species, so like was placed next to like, regardless of taxonomic affiliations, allowing direct comparison.  No shading, no feather texture, all coldly diagrammatic. Our little bird was gray above, yellow below with a thin bill. A warbler.  And while it was still shorts, t-shirt, and running shoe weather for small boys, it was indeed the fall, so the series of plates of figures entitled “confusing fall warblers” seemed an appropriate place to start. There was a page of figures of these uniformly drawn birds that looked like the bird we had, except, they all looked a lot alike; indeed confusing.

But there were differences.  And very quickly we determined that this bird had a significant amount of white on the outer tail feathers, some thin black streaks on the side of the breast and two white wing bars. The Parula Warbler, now called the Northern Parula, to the left of the bird we were zeroing in on, had no streaks on the side of the breast and was more “bluish” on the back of the head. The Prairie Warbler, to the right, had similar streaks but a dark splotch at the base of the neck and no distinctive wing bars.  None of the figures showed the distinctive white bar across the tail, broken in the middle by dark central tail feathers, the only “field mark” indicated for the bird dead center in the middle of the page.  And as final confirmation, while the bird was simply drawn, the artist had shown that dividing the yellow of the throat from the yellow of the breast was a narrow band of very slightly paler yellow, the exact same as the bird in my hand.  Thus was I introduced to my first, of countless thousands to come, Magnolia Warbler, and thus did I learn of a book that I simply had to have.

That was understandable, because, as I would eventually learn, A Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson was arguably the most famous and influential book on birds ever produced in North America, if not anywhere, and ultimately the “Peterson” method if assisting field identification of eastern North American birds was applied to birds in other countries, plus mammals, fish, butterflies, reptiles and amphibians, ferns, trees, flowers, insects, and much else, as invaluable aids to field identification.  The form of art employed was called schematic and would be deemed by the fine art community to be illustrative, not fine art at all. So useful to “bird watchers” as birders were then called, was the book that the first volume, now a valued collector’s item, sold out its initial publication of 2,000 copies in one week.  It propelled the Boston-based publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to decades of financial success while making Peterson the most famous American bird artist of my era, with only the name “Audubon” better known by the public among those plying that rather specialized trade of bird art and illustration to which I so aspired. 

When A Field Guide to the Western Birds came out and I looked through it I was again inspired and frustrated, so much did I want to see those birds.  Spending a few very early childhood years living in the Los Angelis area with my family left me with vague, golden memories of deserts and mountains and the Pacific Ocean.  Now I desperately wanted to see for myself the Yellow-billed Magpie, the Steller’s Jay, the Varied Thrush, the Bullock’s Oriole, the beautifully delicate and so wonderfully named Phainopepla, the California Thrasher, and so much more.  Would I ever?  There was similar yearning upon opening the pages of A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, with so many species I had not heard of illustrated in the Peterson schematic style, and text shared by Peterson, along with Guy Mountford, with P.A.D. Hollom doing the maps showing were each species might normally be found.  It was published by William Collins in 1954. 

As I matured, I increasingly realized that Roger Tory Peterson was a powerhouse of natural history and conservation influence, an environmentalist at the forefront of the modern environmental movement, assuming, as most of us do, you peg the beginning of modern environmentalism at the publication of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, on June 30, 1962. I had just turned 19 when that book came out, and was still thinking in the 19th century gestalt, a way of rationalizing and policy-making that was based on assumptions of human superiority and knowledge blending with an over-simplified mechanistic view of nature that I, myself, would eventually devote so much of my work to challenging. Carson’s book contributed to massive changes in my way of thinking, but that, too, is another story.

Peterson was hugely prolific, a perfectionist workhorse, and I found myself enthralled by his account, written in diary style with accompanying accounts by his British friend, James Fisher, in the book, Wild America, published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1955.  It was illustrated with wonderful vignettes in black and white, crisp, and clean and beautifully accurate, as were the illustration in his Bird Watcher’s Anthology, published by Harcourt Bruce in 1957, and others. 

One of my favorite books, still greatly cherished and often looked at, was a small volume called Wildlife in Color, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1951.  It featured “postage stamp” images of small paintings to be published as fund-raising stamps by the National Wildlife Federation (and also used in collectable cards used to sell tea), done by many of the top nature artists of the first, ever so productive half of the 20th century.  The book featured plants and animals from various broadly defined ecozones in North America, with some of the art and all the text by Peterson. When the lavishly illustrated coffee table book, The World of Birds, co-authored by James Fisher, was published by Doubleday in 1964, there was no way I, or my family, could afford it. I had reached my twenties and the necessities of financial responsibility were now apparent.  Having been forced from school by illness and starting to earn my first income while recovering from a debilitating illness and unable to work full time, I was painfully aware of how much a struggle mere survival could entail.

But that year my mother decided on her own that it was time for me to start fulfilling my dreams and we spent money we really did not have on a trip to celebrate Christmas in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, (Brooks’ country) where I could finally touch base with at least some of those western bird species. We were to spend Christmas with a local family whose relatives were upstairs neighbors in the apartment building we lived in at the time, but on the way there, by train across Canada in the depths of a cold winter (my first experience with forty below zero was at a train stop in Jasper, Alberta), my mom gave me my most valued Christmas gift early, The World of Birds, filled with facts about birds and a wide range of Peterson’s gorgeous illustrations, including many of the non-North American species I so wanted to see, learn about and, myself, portray. 

My mom had already taken me to see a film lecture given by Peterson, based on Wild America, an account of a birding tour by Peterson and Fisher in which they went, as Peterson wryly said from the stage, “…from Newfoundland to Alaska by way of Mexico.”  But I was just too shy to go backstage and meet him afterward.  I finally did meet him when I had a gallery exhibit of my paintings at an art gallery in Yorkville, Toronto, in the summer of 1967, timed to overlap with the annual meeting of what was then called the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) now the America Ornithological Society (AOS), held that year in Toronto from August 21st to the 25th. 

Earlier during the meeting I had met one of the better-known ornithologists of the time, Oliver L. Austin, Jr., (1903 – 1988) who had written Birds of the World, illustrated by Arthur Singer. The book was touted as a “survey of the twenty-seven orders and one hundred and fifty-five families” of birds, was edited by Herbert S. Zim, and published by Golden Press in 1961.  Austin was kind enough to attend my exhibit, a couple of blocks from where most of the meetings were held, but then proceeded to show monumental indifference to what I had done, other than to strongly critique it.  The only error of substance that he mentioned with which I could agree was to show a Peregrine Falcon with a full crop, holding a ptarmigan. “With a full crop the falcon would have no interest in food,” he said. But while constructive criticism is helpful, and something I assuredly needed at age 24, the crop, itself, was not actually bulging, I had overdone the puffiness of the upper breast, subconsciously channeling the Allan Brooks artistic approach to drawing birds. 

Austin seemed to have a chip on his shoulder as he said there were no really good bird artists. When I asked about Fuertes, he dismissed him derisively, and pointed out that Fuertes had painted Redheads with black necks.  He had, indeed, in the New York set of plates, no doubt working from study skins that can cause distortions in patterns and presumably Fuertes, then very young, had seen few or no Redheads up close in the wild or in the hand.  But that all changed and his rendering of them for the series of plates he had been working at the time of this tragic death is stunning, showing a pair of Redheads and a pair of Canvasbacks alighting on wind-ruffled coastal waters beneath a leaden sky.  Austin then said something that totally surprised me, and that he had written Birds of the World to show that Roger Tory Peterson was not the only one capable of such feats. I discreetly avoided mentioning Peterson, of whom I was in awe, had not only helped write the book, but had painted the illustrations.

I later learned that Austin was naturally cantankerous and contrarian, traits that might well have charmed me under different circumstances but crushed me at such a tender age. 

Then I met Roger Tory Peterson. Roger’s comments were constructive and encouraging, and we soon became friends, not close buddies, but definitely soul mates.  He kindly and most definitely took on the role of mentoring, helped me with many different issues, and even included one of my paintings in a magnificent coffee-table book, The Audubon Society Baby Elephant Folio, co-authored with his third wife, Virginia, and published in 1981 by Abbeville Press. I have heard it said that meeting one’s heroes leads to their diminishment.  Terry and Roger were, and are, my heroes, as are other artists, more briefly described below.

Oh, and perhaps I should mention that David Sniderman changed his name, hung around the edges of show business, became a drug dealer, gained some notoriety as the person who turned in Keith Richards for drug use, and died.  I lost track of David McKinnon. I am still drawing and painting birds.