Birder's World Field of View

An anniversary interview with Lee Peterson

It's Thursday, August 28, a great day and an important one for anyone who's ever used a field guide to identify a bird.

Why? Because today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the man who invented the field guide -- Roger Tory Peterson.

Today also happens to be the official pub date of the new one-volume Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, which we reviewed in our October 2008 issue. 

To celebrate both, the anniversary and the field guide, we chatted recently with Lee Allen Peterson, the younger of Roger's two sons and a Peterson-guide author himself. His answers to our questions are below.

Birder’s World: Did your father ever consider creating what this book is: an all-in-one guide to North American birds? Would he be pleased with this new edition (left)?

Lee Peterson: Yes, he thought about doing a combined guide, but for one reason or another, he never did. He would have been very pleased with the sixth edition.

BW: What makes a good field guide?

LP: A good field guide needs to be both comprehensive and concise. And it needs to be portable. This is a balancing act because these goals are somewhat opposite. The degree to which any guide achieves this balance is a measure of its success. Over the years, Dad's books have done this more successfully than the others.

Book raises cash for rarest birds

In addition to raising awareness about the world's most threatened birds, the new Rare Birds Yearbook also raises funds to save them from extinction. (We showcased the book in our April 2008 issue. Read our review.) For every book sold, £4 of the £18.95 price (approximately $7.95 out of $37) is set aside for conservation.

BirdLife International announced today that it has received the first of the proceeds from the 2008 edition of the book. Editor Erik Hirschfeld presented a check for £4,000 (approximately $7,950) to Mike Rands, BirdLife's CEO, to mark the sale of 1,000 copies. 

The money goes to BirdLife's Preventing Extinctions Programme for the protection and conservation of the 189 species listed as Critically Endangered and profiled in the book.

"It is really satisfying to see what a success the Rare Birds Yearbook has become. This money represents an important contribution to the Preventing Extinctions Programme," Rands said.

"I'm thrilled to be able to hand over what is hopefully the first of many checks," Hirschfeld said. "This is a project that is trying to put itself out of business by helping to save Critically Endangered species. But with 189 species currently listed as Critically Endangered we still have a long battle ahead of us." — M.M.

Read our review of the 2008 edition.

Visit www.rarebirdsyearbook.com to buy a copy and submit your photos of Critically Endangered species for the next edition. 

Dana Gardner's new masterpiece

Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest watercolors by Dana Gardner, text by Nancy Overcott, University of Iowa Press, 2007, 128 pages, $34.95, hardcover.

Among the stacks of bird books on my desk is this new gem. It is a collection of 50 paintings by the wonderful bird artist Dana Gardner paired with essays by longtime Minnesota birder Nancy Overcott. Birds featured include White-faced Ibis, Golden Eagle, Upland Sandpiper, and Red-headed Woodpecker. Five of the species that made our readers' top 20 list of birds they want to see are here: Snowy Owl (No. 3), Whooping Crane (No. 5), Great Gray Owl (No. 6), Bohemian Waxwing (No. 13), and Northern Hawk Owl (No. 19).

The essays describe the birds' appearance, habitat, food, and migration patterns. And Overcott explains why the species are considered uncommon, at least here in the Upper Midwest. She also writes about her own experiences watching them. I wish she had had room to say more about her personal accounts, but the one-species-per-spread layout kept the essays short.

The main reason the book is worth 35 of your hard-earned dollars is Gardner. He is as talented a bird artist as they come. His watercolors are true to the birds and their habitats.

Sharks, birds, and Peter Pyle

The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks by Susan Casey, Henry Holt and Company, 2006, 304 pages, $14, paperback.

Yes, this is a book about sharks, and yes, you’re reading about it on a blog about birds. That’s because it’s not just about sharks.

Susan Casey, a magazine writer and editor from New York City, describes in detail her experiences with a handful of shark researchers at the Farallon Islands, spits of jagged, storm-beaten rock 28 miles west of San Francisco that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages.

Great white sharks congregate at the Farallones each fall, but for years no one knew why. Back in the 1980s, a top marine scientist and the ornithologists who kept tabs on the islands’ birds hatched a plan to determine what the sharks were up to. One of them was Peter Pyle.

He’s a central character in Casey’s book, reason enough for anyone interested in birds to read it. Upon his arrival at Southeast Farallon from the mainland one day, Casey writes: “Everyone gathered at the landing to greet him; for young ornithologists, Peter stopping by was like John Coltrane suddenly walking into a class of saxophone students. Each of them had a well-thumbed copy of his book Identification Guide to North American Birds, also known as the bible of bird banding.”

Sharks are at the heart of Casey’s book, but birds make regular appearances, because at the Farallones, they’re everywhere. A rotating crew of biologists and interns share 65-acre Southeast Farallon with 250,000 seabirds, including murres, puffins, auklets, cormorants, and the big bullies — Western Gulls. We meet a biologist who thinks Ashy Storm-Petrels are “absolutely incredible,” and Casey tells the sad history of the eggers who plundered the islands a century earlier.

Through it all, the story is one of dedicated, hard-working people in an inhospitable place doing their best to understand wildlife. — M.M.