Who Was Roger Tory Peterson?

On April 27, 1934, a book was published that would change birding forever.

Roger Tory Peterson’s “A Field Guide to the Birds” had been turned down by four publishers before Houghton Mifflin decided to take a flier (get it?) on it. Not coincidentally, Francis Allen,  the editor who acquired the publication, was president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. But even he saw it as a niche product, only ordering an initial printing of 2,000 copies.

It sold out in two weeks.

“I predict a long life and many editions for this useful book,” wrote Lewis Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune. And he was right.

Since that first edition, millions of copies have been sold. The key, reviewers said at the time and to this day, is that the book was helpful for amateur and beginning birders, offering brief tips on how to tell various birds apart. The book also featured lots of illustrations of the birds themselves.

Peterson, an artist trained at the National Academy of Design in New York City, first offered clinical schematics of the birds for his guides, and then graduated into more lush, formal paintings of the animals themselves.

At one point, the New York Times referred to him as the “modern Audubon,” a reference to the society’s namesake, John James Audubon, himself a prolific painter. (Peterson didn’t think it entirely complimentary, calling Audubon a predator for his practice of shooting and mounting the birds before painting them.)

By the 1980s, Peterson was a living legend, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a two-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1994, the Roger Tory Peterson Institute opened in his hometown of Jamestown, New York. Peterson died two years later, but 1,500 of his original artworks and illustrations live on at the institute, which this year celebrates the 90th anniversary of the publication of the first Peterson field guide.

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