After being rejected by four other publishers who thought the market for such a book was too small to be worth their time, when Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds: Giving Field Marks of All Species Found in Eastern North America was first published on 27 April 1934 by Houghton Mifflin in an initial printing of 2,000 copies, it sold out in two weeks. It has ever since reigned as the monarch of North American field guides, being still available in the seventh edition Peterson Field Guide To Birds Of Eastern & Central North America, now published by HarperCollins following Houghton Mifflin (Harcourts)’s sale of its trade publishing division and other assets to News Corp in 2021. But enough about the board room machinations of the present-day masters of the universe
While most bird watchers have almost certainly seen a copy of at least one of the printings of one of the editions of Peterson’s field guides to birds, many may not have seen a first edition of it. Unlike the present-day editions of the Peterson field guides, and most all new field guides in general, the first Peterson guide was noteworthy for the eloquent brevity of its text, and its black and white images. (For those interested, Houghton Mifflin published a reprint edition of this classic book in 1997 that while now out-of-print can still be found with regularity in shops selling used books.) These black and white images – both plates of Peterson’s paintings and line illustrations – were partly due to the economically-dictated limitation of such guidebooks of the time as color printing was far more expensive then than it is today.
Publishers of modern field guides to birds now take full advantage of the technological advantages of printing technology developed since the 1930s, and as a result we have an abundance of works filled cover-to-cover with vivid color illustrations and photographs depicting every tiny detail that could be relevant to the identification of a bird to species and even subspecies level. However when I recently took up a reading of another early work by Peterson that was published a decade and a half after his initial guide, I began to think that in what has been gained something important has been lost as well.
Petertson’s How to Know the Birds was first published in 1949, four years after his wartime service in the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, during which two very important things occurred in his life. First, in developing manuals used to identify aircraft and artillery, he refined his system of bird identification by field marks with the addition to it of what he learned about the use of general size and shape (GISS) in identification of distant or unclear objects; a refinement that would yield an advance in field identification of species that would greatly enhance the recreational lives of millions of bird watchers ever since, and second, his contribution to an early study of the effects of DDT that would later be used by Rachel Carson in her work and result in the banning of that insecticide for the betterment of the overall health of birds and people all around the world.
How to Know the Birds is not a field guide. It is a short course of very effective instruction in how to identify bird species in the field. Like the original Field Guide, the illustrations are in black and white, with a short central section of small color-printed images of painted images of birds that would likely strike the modern bird watcher as closer to attractive greeting card covers that field identification tools. Following an initial brief introduction to birds in general, he continues with explanations of what to look for when watching birds; general shapes, different types of movements, and voices, as well as the importance of times of year and locations. From this he presents brief but very effective commentaries on each bird family, most commonly accompanied by a simple black and white line drawing. It was by contemplating these black and white images in relation to how Peterson used them to provide his readers with an effective method of identifying birds in the field that I began to re-examine my own bird identification field craft skills.
One of the basic rules by which birds live is always seeking to do what they need to do at every given moment to obtain the resources they need to preserve their own lives. Whether this is in the acquisition of food, the attraction of a mate, the construction of a nest, or protecting themselves against being the meal of another creature, none of these, even for a fraction of a second, include making it easier for any given bird watcher to get a nice, clear look at them. Consequently, the majority of the time they are able to be observed, aside from when they visit feeding stations, they are not able to be seen in optimal viewing conditions. While modern optical instruments can sometimes help overcoming such difficulties, Peterson wrote How to Know the Birds at a time when the most common binoculars available were military-style field glasses designed for observing much larger things than sparrows. And for many, even these were not as easy to obtain or affordable as a basic binocular is today; thus many who watched birds simply did so without the benefit of additional optical assistance.
Just as the Moody Blues taught us in Graeme Edge’s poem Late Lament, recited in the latter part of Nights in White Satin, “Cold-hearted orb that rules the night / Removes the colors from our sight / Red is grey and yellow, white / But we decide which is right / And which is an illusion,” the lack of sufficient illumination on a subject makes it difficult to perceive its coloration. So it is with birds viewed with the Sun behind them, or in deep cover, or at too great a distance. Similarly, the colors of over-illuminated subjects such as those positioned in the middle of a patch of bright reflection on the surface of a body of water are also often difficult to perceive. Therefore, knowing the basic light and dark patterns of subjects, such as Peterson presents, can often prove more useful when afield that knowing the actual colors themselves.
What particularly caught my attention in these commentaries are Peterson’s frequent references to practicality. When I first began watching birds, the field guide I bought for the purpose presented all included species more or less equally, with little regard beyond range maps for how likely I was to see a particular species in the location where I was. To a novice, this can cause extended periods of frustrating time spent staring at a small brown bird whilst thumbing frantically through a guidebook trying to hang a species name on it, and then generally being mistaken. And then when one meets up with more experienced bird watchers (as well as birders – who are different creatures indeed) this is aggravated further as they tend to be more interested in seeing “good birds” – less commonly seen species – and so the focus is to often shifted to the unusual over the usual.
In his How to Know the Birds, Peterson gives every indication that he wants his readers to discover the joy in the usual. His repeated comments about a particular species not being able to be readily identified by anyone but experts, or entire families, jaegers for example, being only found in locations where few people go. He makes it very clear: it’s perfectly acceptable to be unable to identify every bird you see, just as it is to be mistaken. In this, for modern readers, what is brought back is the reminder of what bird watching can be as the pleasant pastime it once most commonly was rather than the sport that the growth of birding has made it.
After reviewing the various North American bird families, Peterson concludes with an overview of habitats where his readers might look to find birds and silhouettes of common ones. Yet here as well, the overviews are not heavily laden with details but rather are brief narrative portraits of such places as “Towns and Farms,” “Fields and Meadows,” and “Brushy Places,” complete with the most common species of families to be found in them. And as for the silhouettes, we are taken once again to the idea that optimal views are not commonly found. Indeed, after completing my reading of the book, I went afield without any optical instruments to see what birds I could identify by Peterson’s presented methods. I was greatly surprised to discover that I could do so far more often than I expected.
While How to Know the Birds is, like so many naturalist classics, now out of print, it was in print for decades so copies of i should be able to be found in libraries or used book shops without too much difficulty. For any who would like to learn more about what Peterson included in this book, to learn a very effective “old school” method of bird watching, or to undertake a re-examination of – as I did – your own field craft techniques, I very much encourage such a search for a copy to be undertaken.
