Of a Feather: The field marks of Roger Tory Peterson

By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson

At the end of each of these columns I note that I became a birdwatcher at the age of 10. In a way it was one of those “road to Damascus” situations although I might have been a nicer little kid than Saul of Tarsus was a man, and I don’t recall being blinded before I could “see.” In any case, when we moved into a new house in the summer of 1971, there was a pile of junk on the lawn and in the middle of that pile was a battered copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s “A Field Guide to Birds.”

It was the third edition from 1947, which is billed as the “second revised and enlarged edition.” The original book was published in 1934 by the Houghton Mifflin Company. I owned this increasingly bedraggled book for 30 years and put it aside only when my brother gave me “The Sibley Guide to Birds” for Christmas when it was published in 2000. My original field guide was by then imperfectly held together with tape and eventually, reluctantly, I threw it out. More recently, I bought a paperback reissue of it at a used bookstore, just to have it around.

The first edition of Peterson’s guide had a subtitle: “Giving the field marks of all species found in Eastern North America,” which evolved by 1947 into “… found east of the Rockies.” More specifically, he included birds that lived east of the 100th meridian, which runs through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and eastern Texas. At age 10 I was intrigued by the idea of “field marks” and by this geographical proscription.

Peterson, the son of Swedish and German immigrants, grew up in Jamestown, New York in straitened circumstances caused by the early death of his father. Although fascinated by natural history as a child, Peterson’s formal education was in art. Like millions of Americans through the 20th century, he moved from the hinterlands to New York City to pursue his career. In New York he studied at the Arts Students League and the National Academy of Design, but he fell in with a bad crowd: the Bronx County Bird Club (BCBC).

The BCBC was founded by nine teenagers in November 1924, although the oldest among them had been birding since 1918. While bird watching at the Hunt’s Point dump in 1921, they had a chance encounter with naturalist Charles M. Johnston, who suggested they begin attending meetings of the Linnaean Society of New York. This introduced them to the “mainstream” of the naturalist community, where professionals and amateurs rubbed elbows. In 1925 several of them attended the meeting of the American Ornithologists Union in the city, where they met 18-year-old Peterson, who had come down from Jamestown to attend.

Peterson moved to the city in 1927. He settled in Brooklyn and became involved in the Linnaean Society, where he got to know BCBC members better. Soon, Peterson became the first non-Bronx-dwelling member of the club.

In the mid-1920s the proceedings of the Linnaean Society were dominated by Ludlow Griscom, an austere New Englander who was then assistant curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History. Griscom had published “Birds of the New York City Region” in 1923, where he deployed his “field mark” system, but did so in an almost chatty fashion. The few illustrations in it were reproduced paintings of the birds in their natural environment.

Griscom developed the field mark system to identify birds at a distance and through binoculars. Earlier guides would describe, for example, a robin as having a white eye ring broken into three parts and a throat finely barred with black and white. These are features easily seen after you have shot the bird and are holding it in your hand. Inspired by Griscom, Peterson’s guide tells you a robin has “a gray back and a (italics) brick-red breast … The bill is (italics again) yellow.”

Peterson aspired to be a fine artist, but unlike some, he had no independent means. So, out of necessity he focused on commercial illustration. He brought this valuable perspective to his 1934 field guide, where he combined Griscom’s field mark system with diagrammatic paintings of every species. He also took inspiration from Ernest Thompson Seton’s 1903 book “Two Little Savages,” which included a plate with profile views of several duck species simplified to their essential patterns.

To the Seton-style profiles Peterson added bold diagonal bars aimed directly at the field marks. Although the majority of the plates were in color, Peterson inserted several that were in what we now call grayscale. These showed waterfowl and shorebirds in flight and departed from the flat profile view to show them in perspective. On some plates, such as the one for owls, he showed birds in color and three-quarter perspective, revealing a fraction more of his considerable talents.

His text was also innovative in several ways. Species descriptions in guides of the time were neither comparative nor written in Peterson’s telegraphic prose. He introduced families with terse paragraphs and species descriptions did not always include complete sentences. Each one had the same three or four subheadings: field marks, voice, range, and—an idea from Griscom—similar species. And the whole book was small, 4.5 x 7 inches, to fit in a coat pocket.

Since the appearance of Peterson’s book, nearly all field guides (not just those for birds) have been designed on his model. In 1946 the Audubon Society had Richard Pough write the text and Don Eckelberry illustrate the birds of eastern and central North America. But it took two of them and the prose was chattier and the paintings, artier. It went out of print after two editions.

The seventh edition of Peterson’s guide was published last year, 24 years after his death.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher from the age of 10. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times and now lives and works in the town of Wilmot. Contact him at [email protected].