All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures (Peterson Field Guide)

All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures (Peterson Field Guide)

The world's most famous bird watcher recounts his travels in pursuit of birds. A decade after the death of Roger Tory Peterson, his unique perspective on birding comes to life in these highly personal narratives. Here he relates his adventures during a lifetime of traveling the world to observe and record nature. Peterson's sense of adventure and curiousity could not be extinguished. While in his eighties, as one essay relates, his boat capsized in freezing water off the coast of Maine as he was filming a documentary. In another essay we watch his tiny rowboat get caught in an angry sea off the coast of Argentina. Then there is what Peterson called his most exciting bird experience: searching for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Though Peterson was widely known for his illustrations, this collection reminds us of his accomplishments as a phtographer, for Peterson was nearly as passionate about photography as he was about painting. The essays, photographs, and illustrations included here were carefully selected by Bill Thompson III, the editor of Bird Watcher's Digest, which ran Peterson's column, "All Things Reconsidered," during the last twelve years of his life. "All Things Reconsidered" was the title of Peterson’s monthly column in Bird Watcher’s Digest, which he wrote from 1984 until his death in 1996. Thompson, editor of the Digest, has chosen 40-odd columns and illustrated them with Peterson’s own photographs (the great naturalist was nearly as passionate about photography as he was about painting). These are the best of Peterson’s chatty columns, in which he shared his birding adventures—from the hot plains of the Serengeti, where he stabilized his long lens on "a cloth bag filled with rice," to freezing water off the coast of Maine, where his boat capsized as he, then in his 80s, was filming a documentary. Editors of Scientific American Peterson's first Field Guide to the Birds was published in 1934, leading to countless numbers of field guides following in its wake. He observed that birds "are the most intensely alive of all creatures, often moving, darting, hopping, flying, or at times, migrating thousands of miles." He was one of the world's most renowned naturalists, and reading this collection of 42 of his columns from Bird Watcher's Digest offers much insight into his perspective on the changes he saw in his lifetime. He wrote the column "All Things Reconsidered" from 1984 until his death in 1996, covering an array of topics: his birding adventures, the lives of certain species, and the growth and changes in bird watching, for example. Bill Thompson, editor of Bird Watcher's Digest , sees that Peterson was an expert illustrator and writer as well as a photographer and lecturer. Each of the book's essays is illustrated with Peterson's photographs--80 in all. Bird-watchers will love the book, and non-bird-watchers who read it will want to join the ranks of birders. George Cohen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved On Audubon and Those Confusing Warblers Several of my friends have taken me to task for giving two of the color plates in my eastern field guide the title "Confusing Fall Warblers." They are not confusing, they insist. Perhaps not to them, but the little greeny-brown jobs remain confusing to 95 percent of the bird watching crowd—or at least to those who do not consider themselves "hard-core." Even Audubon was confused. Of the thirty-eight species of wood warblers found normally in eastern North America he eventually knew all but one. In attempting to sort them out, he was relatively late on the scene. Early on, Linnaeus, the creator of the Systema Naturae, and his successor, Johann Georg Gmelin, as well as a number of other workers, had already named and described twenty-five species of North American warblers. That was before Alexander Wilson published his American Ornithology, wherein he described another ten. By the time Audubon came on the scene, twenty years later, he was able to add only two new ones: Swainson's warbler and the now nearly extinct Bachman's warbler, both furtive southerners first discovered by his friend the Reverend Bachman of Charleston. After Audubon, only one species, Kirtland's warbler, a rarity restricted to the pine barrens of Michigan, remained to be described. But Audubon tried hard; he named and illustrated ten or eleven species that did not exist—variants or obscure plumages of already well- known species. Many birders have found that the sumptuous showcase of Audubon's prints published by Abbeville Press—The Baby Elephant Folio— was beyond their pocketbooks. But if they did purchase the book, they may have looked only at the pictures, ignoring the text prepared after considerable research by my wife, Ginny, and me. Inasmuch as the tome weighs eighteen pounds, it is not exactly a field guide or bedtime reading. For the benefit of a wider audience, I have pulled things together and adapted from t