Afield With the Man Who Put Bird-Watching on Map

The old bird-watcher approached the young naturalist, and politely asked why he had arranged a dozen buckets of mud on a turnout beside the Back Bay estuary in Newport Beach.

The young guy, whose name tag read Orange County Department of Environmental Field Study, explained that, soon, a busload of schoolchildren would arrive. Giggling and gasping, they would explore the black ooze with their fingers and therein learn about the delicate web of life in the salt marsh.

The old birder’s eyes sparked with interest. He asked more questions. The 33-year-old instructor answered in the patient, slightly condescending manner of a hip high school teacher explaining rock ‘n’ roll to a dottering aunt.

The old birder listened intently. Then, when the young man indicated that he had better get back to the important work of teaching children the wonders of nature, the old birder’s wife introduced him: “This is Roger Tory Peterson.”

The young naturalist’s legs buckled. His face flashed the expression of a garage band guitarist who had just told B. B. King about the glory of the blues.

“It’s a wonderful pleasure to meet you,” he blurted, doing an odd little involuntary dip. “I have your field guide back in my car. My copy is so worn out! It’s been rained on. I’ve used it as a pillow. . . . I’ve been using your books, forever!”

“Not forever,” Peterson said, smiling. “It’s only been around for 56 years.”

Three Cinnamon Teals battered the air at eye level, then plummeted into the water, shattering the perfect relection of blue sky and clouds. A 727 took off from John Wayne Airport and droned overhead.

“I knew he was a birder,” the young man was heard muttering a few minutes later. “But not the birder.”

Peterson published his first field guide to birds in 1934. Based on a simple identification procedure using birds’ “field marks,” the system revolutionized bird-watching, and the Peterson series expanded to include guides to wildflowers, butterflies and other flora and fauna, 60 titles in all.

Over the next decades, birding grew increasingly popular in the United States and something of a national obsession in Great Britian.

“In England,” Peterson said, in his gentle whisper of a voice, “a rare River Warbler showed up in an oat field. So many birders arrived they trampled the farmer’s crop. He had to turn a manure spreader on them.”

Last week, word got out that there had been scattered sightings of Peterson in Southern California. Birders flocked to bookstores where the 81-year-old painter and author signed copies of the third edition of his classic guide “Western Birds.”

For a brief respite, Peterson and his wife, Virginia--whom he affectionately calls “Ginny”--slipped off with Santa Barbara wildlife photographer B. “Moose” Peterson (no relation) to watch and photograph birds.

Although he had never been there before, Roger Tory Peterson seemed at home in the Back Bay. It is, after all, a sort of unofficial monument to his life’s work, a place where humanity and other life forms have reached a fragile truce in the ongoing struggle for living space.

Not that Peterson is a tree-thumping environmentalist. He has met four Presidents without preaching to any, he said. When he met former President Ronald Reagan, for instance, Peterson said only: “Hello. I’m the bird man. You probably use my field guide on your California ranch.”

In his “Birder’s Handbook,” population crusader Paul Ehrlich writes, “In this century, no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson.. . .”

The current Audubon magazine suggests that Peterson and “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson “are the two people most responsible for creating the modern environmental movement in America. Peterson’s achievement was to teach Americans, who were losing touch with the wild world, to take another look and see it clearly. . . . Seeing led to understanding, and understanding to caring about both birds and their habitats . . . “

A few years ago, Peterson had cataracts removed; he now has an implant in one eye, a hard lens in the other. Even with his omnipresent binoculars and his cameras’ long Telephoto lenses, quick focusing is difficult.

“My ears are excellent for my age,” he says. “My eyes give me an argument.”

But even casual observation of Peterson reveals a rare intensity of perception. A slight tilt of his head focuses attention on things that dozens of joggers and hikers and bicyclists flash past: A snowy egret high-stepping through the shallow water, revealing the yellow feet that earned it the name “bird with the golden slippers”; the great egret, leaning forward, extending its long crooked neck, and jabbing an awesomely effective yellow bill into the mud.

“Both these birds were in trouble in the late 1880s,” Peterson said. Back then, ladies’ hats adorned with egret feathers were fashionable. Blasting at flocks with powerful scatter shot, poachers killed the birds by the thousands.

“The whole Audubon movement started to protect them,” Peterson said, his eyes sweeping the landscape as he talked. “The birds have recovered marvelously.”

Several California least terns splashed into the water.

“There’s a long-billed curlew, Ginny,” he said, his eyes targeting a brownish bird with an improbably long, needlelike bill.

“Look, a short-billed dowitcher,” he said. “They’re on their way to the Alaskan tundra.”

What had seemed a monolithic mud flat covered with just “birds” became, under Peterson’s gaze, a multifarious display of species. Some of them, he explained, are like “slurping machines,” with bills that let them dredge deep into the mud for mollusks and other invertebrates; others sweep the surface snapping at bugs.

“They don’t really compete in the ecosystem; they each do different jobs,” Peterson said.

Hefting his camera and tripod onto his shoulder, Peterson hiked up the road to another spot overlooking the estuary.

White cabbage butterflies flitted in the wild mustard and bladderpod. An Anna’s hummingbird hovered above a strand of barbed-wire across the road.

“That avocet is really smashing,” his wife said, of an elegant bird with a pink head and a long, upturned bill. Overhead, a Piper Cub droned out of the airport.

Peterson stopped in place. His eyes focused on nothing. His ears tuned in the song of a Savannah Sparrow, which his guide describes as “a dreamy, lisping tsit-tsit-tsit tseeee-tsaaay. “

“Isn’t this a lovely way to earn a living?” Virginia said to no one in particular.

“Birding can be a sport, a science, a hobby” Peterson said. “To some, it’s a sort of game. To others, an art, an ethic or therapy.

“A priest in the Rio Grande Valley told me that it can also be a religious experience. I said ‘That’s because the only other creatures with wings are angels.’

These days Peterson gets the most pleasure from simply watching and listening to birds--common as well as rare--and trying to understand the way they live and the dynamics of bird populations.

The new guide, featuring paintings of 1,000 birds, took him more than six years to complete, he said. His wife researched and edited 441 maps depicting the birds’ range of habitat.

The Petersons live in Old Lyme, Conn., near the Connecticut River, sharing a 70-acre spread with deer, opossum, foxes and a coyote. There are 152 species of bird on the property, and the butterfly garden Virginia planted has attracted 33 species of butterflies.

But he’s not home all that much, often traveling five months out of the year. This fall, he plans trips to Brazil and New Zealand. He plans to return to Antarctica soon, a continent he has visited at least 16 times, the home of his favorite bird and the inspiration for his birder nickname: “King Penguin.”

Last week, though, Peterson was perfectly content watching avocets and swallows and the rare clapper rail in Southern California, which he said is a “marvelous state because it has this enormous diversity of both wildlife and people.”

When the busload of grade-school students arrived at the Back Bay, he watched them as intently as he had watched the strutting egrets.

“Ten, 11, 12--that’s the critical age to get them involved in nature,” he said.

That’s about the age Peterson joined a Junior Audubon club in Jamestown, N.Y., paying a dime for a booklet of bird outlines. He colored them in, and later began sketching birds in margins of his history books.

But the real transformation occurred when he and a friend hiked across the railroad to Swede Hill and came upon a big bunch of brown feathers in a field. “I reached out and touched it. I thought it was dead. But it looked up, startled, alive.”

The bird was a flicker, a kind of woodpecker, and its vital stare left a lifelong impression on Peterson’s young psyche.

That, Peterson said, was at 9:30 a.m., April 8, 1920.

“Since then birds have seemed to symbolize being alive. They’re a very vivid symbol of life for me,” he said, as behind him, the Orange County naturalist looked into the eyes of his young audience and spoke passionately about the wonders of nature.