Roger Tory Peterson.
Roger Tory Petersons biggest contribution to environmentalism was his system of bird identification. By using his system, anyone could identify live birds in the wild. This was the beginning of the popular hobby of birding.
Peterson was born in Jamestown, New York, on August 28, 1908. His father, Charles Gustav Peterson, was an immigrant from Sweden. His mother, Henrietta Bader, had come from Germany. At the time of Roger’s birth, woolen mills provided most of the jobs in Jamestown. The Swedish craftsmen made it into a city of furniture factories. Roger’s father began work in the woolen mills at age 10 to help support his family after his father died. He only had a third-grade education. As a child, Roger resented his father and thought he was hard on him. Mr. Peterson also didn’t understand Roger’s interest in nature. But his mother did. She made him a butterfly net and went to the druggist to get cyanide for him so he could preserve insect specimens.
The Chadakoin River in Jamestown, New York.
Library of Congress HAER NY,7-JAMTO,2--1
The other children didn’t understand Roger, either. He had skipped two grades, so he was younger than his classmates. They weren’t interested in nature and called him “Professor Nuts Peterson.” Since the other children thought he was strange, Roger was a loner, content to enjoy nature by himself.
Northern flicker.
Dover Publications, Inc.
When Roger was in seventh grade, his teacher, Blanche Hornbeck, got her students to join the Junior Audubon Club and taught them about birds. She often took them to the woods and used nature to teach science, art, and writing. Roger began studying, photographing, and drawing birds. Then he started painting them.
Roger was hiking one Saturday morning and saw what looked like a clump of feathers in a tree. It was a northern flicker. Thinking it was dead, Roger said, “I poked it with a stick and it burst into colors, with the red on the back of its head and the gold on its wing. It was the contrast, you see, between something I thought was dead and something so alive. Like a resurrection…. It made me more aware of the world in which we live.”
As a boy, Roger got a job delivering newspapers so he could buy a camera to photograph birds. He wrote, “I … saved enough for a four by five inch plate camera, a Primo No. 9, that cost me somewhat more than $100, a lot of money in those days.” He used the camera only to photograph birds. He didn’t even take pictures of his friends.
Roger’s first published photo, of northern cardinals, appeared in the 1925 Jamestown High School yearbook. The next year, they used his photo of black-capped chickadees.
Roger’s best grades in high school were in art, history of art, and mechanical drawing. He graduated at the age of 16. Next to his picture in the yearbook was written, “Woods! Birds! Flowers! Here are the makings of a great naturalist!” Whoever wrote that was right.
His first job in the summer of 1925 was at the Union National Furniture Company. He made $8 a week painting Chinese designs on fancy wood cabinets. His boss, William von Langereis, encouraged him to become an artist and insisted he enroll in art school.
Roger worked and saved his money for two years. During those two years, he practiced drawing, painting, and photographing birds. He spent hours at the library in Jamestown researching nature.
In 1927 Peterson began studies at the Art Students League in New York City. Two years later, he went on to the National Academy of Design. He also read magazines about birds, including The Auk (journal of the America Ornithological Union), Wilson’s Bulletin (journal of the Wilson Ornithological Society), Bird Lore (National Audu-bon Society Magazine), and National Geographic.
Peterson read a notice in The Auk about a bird art show at the American Museum of Natural History. He submitted two paintings and both were accepted. The next year two of his paintings were displayed at Cooper Ornithological Club’s first American Bird art exhibit at their annual meeting in Los Angeles. At only 17, he was already exhibiting his paintings with the great bird artists of the time.
When Peterson graduated from the National Academy of Design in 1931, he got a job teaching science and art at a private day school. The Rivers Country Day School in Brookline, Massachusetts, was a prep school for wealthy boys. He taught there for three years. One of his students was Elliot Richardson, who later became attorney general of the United States. Richardson said Peterson was the teacher who influenced him the most.
During the summers, Peterson served as a nature counselor. He worked first at a YMCA camp in Michigan. Then he spent five summers working at Camp Chewonki in Maine.
In 1929, Bill Vogt, editor of Bird Lore Magazine, suggested to Peterson that he write a field guide to birds. Peterson began working on one. It was rejected by three New York publishers. Finally, Houghton Mifflin, a small publisher in Boston, agreed to publish the book. They would print 2,000 copies, but he wouldn’t get any royalties on the first thousand.
In less than three weeks, the books were all sold. Roger received 10 cents apiece on the second thousand books—$100. The book and its later editions have since sold over seven million copies.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Library of Congress LC-D4-71386
I Learn to identify eight birds in your backyard or at a nearby park using the Peterson Identification System.
What made the book so popular was the Peterson Identification System. Using this system, anyone could identify live birds in the wild. Before this book came out, birds were identified through a series of measurements and observations of dead specimens.
Peterson said, “I grouped birds that looked alike and therefore might be mistaken for each other, instead of grouping them by species. I … drew little arrows to point out the ‘field marks’ that are the main information you need to identify a bird. Those arrows were my invention.”
His descriptions are short and simple but very useful in learning to identify birds. For example, he wrote about the male American goldfinch— “The only small yellow bird with black wings.” Anyone who learns that description can easily identify a goldfinch flying by.
After the book was published, Peterson took a job in New York as art editor and educational specialist for Audubon Magazine. He began working on other field guides, and the series now totals 52 books.
His son, Lee Peterson, described how his father worked. “Dad always likened writing a field guide to serving a prison sentence…. When he was working full-bore, he would work around the clock … his focus and intensity at work were phenomenal…. As for my brother, Tory, and I, there were days we might only see him at the breakfast or dinner tables or hear him return from the studio in the middle of the night.”
Peterson began writing articles on birds and other topics. He loved to teach about the importance of using the environment wisely.
During World War II, he served in the Air Corps from 1940 to 1943. He was asked to write a plane-spotting training manual. Because people were successful at identifying birds with his field guide, the Air Corps believed he could adapt his system to teach the identification of planes.
After the war, Peterson spent the next 50 years writing, painting birds, and photographing birds. His work appeared in National Geographic, Field and Stream, Ranger Rick, Life, Audubon, Nature, and Reader’s Digest. Much of his time was spent writing field guides on all kinds of topics, from insects, to animal tracks, to wildflowers. For the last 30 years of his life, he and his wife, Virginia, traveled and worked together on the field guides.
American goldfinch.
The Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York, was dedicated on August 29, 1993, the day after Peterson’s 85th birthday. He attended, and the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to him.
Peterson won many awards, including the Conservation Medal of the National Audubon Society, the Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund, and awards from the Swedish and the Dutch. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Peterson photographing birds for a field guide.
© Bob Krist/CORBIS
Peterson actively wrote, photographed, and painted to the very end. His stepdaughter, Mimi Westervelt, described him taking a photo. She said,
At age 87, he’s crouched down, camera to his eye, in some brush along a wetland focusing on a butterfly. He’s just walked through some thorny mass of greenbrier or thistle or multiflora rose and his legs and arms are all scraped up, but he never mentions it. Because he doesn’t feel it. His head and neck are thick with insects, but he never flinches. Because he doesn’t feel them. He doesn’t see them. He doesn’t hear them. All he sees is that butterfly. As long as he hadn’t just run out of film, Roger knew how to focus.
President Jimmy Carter.
Library of Congress LC-U9- 39080B-11A
Peterson summed up his beliefs by saying, “The philosophy that I have worked under most of my life is that the serious study of natural history is an activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person’s life. It ultimately makes people protective of the environment, in a very committed way. It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue for creating environmentalists.”
Peterson died on July 29, 1996, soon after Mimi wrote this observation. He was still working on the fifth edition of A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America when he passed away, as well as several other projects. His wife, Virginia, said that the morning of his death he was working on a painting of flycatchers for the book. The plate with the unfinished paintings was included in the field guide.
The New York Times announced his death, referring to him as “the best-known ornithologist of the twentieth century.” Sports Afield called him “the twentieth century’s most influential naturalist.” Paul Erlich wrote in The Birders’ Handbook, “In this century, no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson, the inventor of the modern field guide.”
Peterson made it possible for the average person to identify birds in the wild and to enjoy the hobby of birding. But he promoted all of nature through his field guides on almost every natural history topic. His challenge to those of us left on Earth is to help to sustain the natural order in the world as well as to recognize its beauty.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest award given to civilians by the United States. The recipients are chosen by the president.
In 1945, President Harry Truman established a Medal of Freedom to reward civilians who served during World War II. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy established the current award. The same person can receive the medal more than once. It can also be awarded posthumously.
A number of environmentalists have received the medal. They include Jacques Cous-teau, Rachel Carson, Mardy Murie, Marjorie Stoneham Douglas, and Roger Tory Peterson. The medal was also awarded to Gaylord Nelson for his part in establishing Earth Day.