Golden times of field guides.

PositionSPORTS

Byline: Mark Blazis

COLUMN: OUTDOORS

After he personally nominated me for nature educator of the year for North America, I spent considerable time with country's greatest field guide illustrator, Roger Tory Peterson.

My wife and I had the privilege of being with him and his wife in Jamestown, N.Y., where he was born, and where the Roger Tory Peterson Institute - devoted to nature education - is located. By that time, he had seen his nationally acclaimed 1980 work trumped in 1983 by a team of artists and writers who collaborated to produce a state-of-the-art "National Geographic Society Field Guide to the Birds of North America."

It was astounding in its completeness, its supreme attention to detail of plumages as they changed with age and sex. Peterson subsequently heard criticisms that he complacently had not kept up with advances in identifications.

This criticism hurt him badly, he said, especially because it came from some of the top American field ornithologists whom he had mentored. The criticism drove him painfully to work on a final edition, a truly great effort that he confided was, as he had aged considerably in finishing it, "a constant battle between my eyes and hands to paint." His death in 1996 necessitated a posthumous fourth edition publication in 2002. I love that book.

The National Geographic guide set a higher standard over Peterson in many ways. It contained more natural poses with birds, often showing behavioral traits in their habitat, something Peterson never really got into. But the National Geographic guide, to be fair, was a collaboration of many bird artists and writers.

In a time that was called "the battle of the field guides," many new books came out. All had had the advantage of standing on Peterson's shoulders, which set the standard. Peterson's field guide was all done by one great man.

One advantage it has over the marvelous National Geographic guide, which I use extensively and value highly, is its uniformity of style and quality. When you look at families of birds in National Geographic, you see a great variability in style and even quality.

When the National Geographic guide first came out, I immediately bought it and used it almost exclusively, like just about every other serious birder. My Peterson was shelved. The new guide had more species, including rare birds from Asia that would show up in remote Alaska.

As DNA began to reveal the complexities of speciation, we began adding more birds to our North...

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