Northern Woodlands

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Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson

Roger Tory Peterson, a man in need of a big biography, finally has one. At 422 pages, Elizabeth Rosenthal delivers a thorough and masterful account of the man known to friends as the “King Penguin.”

It can be argued that no one in our lifetime has done more to encourage the appreciation of natural history than Peterson, a writer, artist, illustrator, photographer, teacher, and creator of the modern field guide. So profound was his 65-year contribution to wildlife and wildlands conservation that he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980 and was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize in 1983 and again in 1986, when he made the short list of four.

Who among us didn’t grow up with Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America, its distinctive arrows highlighting field marks? First published in 1933 and completely revamped three times (the final edition appeared in 1980), this mother of all field guides sold millions of copies and begot Houghton Mifflin’s Peterson Series, which today numbers 50 titles and includes guides to everything from animal tracks to moths, the atmosphere to eastern forests, seashells to ferns.

Peterson was an enormously accomplished man. He was a founder of the World Wildlife Fund; he invented the “Big Year” birding competitions with his book Wild America (a childhood favorite of mine); he received nine honorary doctorates; he helped steer the National Audubon Society out of the depression and into the forefront of the environmental movement; and he was the National Wildlife Federation’s director of art for nearly 30 years. But Rosenthal describes more than just Peterson’s accomplishments; she also exposes his underbelly.

The globetrotting naturalist was extremely generous to colleagues, students, and organizations in need of his help or endorsement but had little time for his wives and children. Barbara, Peterson’s second wife, to whom he was married for 33 years, mothered his four children, raised their family, took care of their homestead, edited and promoted his work, booked his engagements, made sure he was prepared for meetings, lectures, seminars, tours, and made it possible for his considerable genius to flower. After devoting her life to him, she was shopped out for a younger version.

Peterson’s third wife, Virginia, teetering on the brink of pathological insecurity, drove a wedge between her husband and his grown kids, pried herself into his interviews, and determined whom he saw or spoke to. She even monitored phone calls. Many Connecticut neighbors and longtime friends were surgically excised from his social schedule.

Using volumes of letters and more than a hundred interviews, Rosenthal bares a man who frets that the world sees him as an illustrator, not an artist. She’s at her expositional best writing about his pain at the death of old friends and his eloquent defense of the fourth edition of the eastern field guide, which, although both the hardcover and paperback versions appeared simultaneously on The New York Times best-sellers list, received poor reviews from birders who demanded more. Perhaps, writes Rosenthal, he “had created a monster of telescope-toting . . . authorities . . .”, a progeny “itching for a different sort of Peterson revision than they got.”

He had fledged his own critics.

Ted Levin

© 2011 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Ancestral Plants: A Primitive Skills Guide

By the time you read this, the annual banquet of fiddleheads may have passed, but a cornucopia of other wild foods, medicines, and materials are available to anyone who cares to discover them. Arthur Haines can aid this discovery with his excellent new work, Ancestral Plants, a book that will be enjoyed by those looking to find a deeper relationship to the natural world through interaction with the plants that surround us.

Beyond (but including) widely known wild foods such as fiddleheads, wild leeks, and blueberries, Haines opens the door to creating positive, non-exploitive, mutually beneficial relationships with the myriad wild plants that surround us in the northeastern landscape. The guide is easy to use and backed by Haines’s own experiences and research as a practitioner and teacher of foraging skills.

Ancestral Plants offers brief but highly informative accounts of over 100 plant species in the Northeast. Each species account includes scientific and common names, color photos, a quick reference guide to major types of uses, and brief botanical descriptions. The descriptions of uses are succinct but quite thorough and truly useful. Haines has organized information about harvest timing, standard dosages, modes of medicinal action, routes of administration, and phytochemical classification in separate sections that work in concert with the individual species accounts to convey the full detail and understanding necessary to make use of each plant. As indicated by the subtitle, Ancestral Plants goes beyond edible and medicinal uses to explore the many ways plants can meet our material needs, from fire making to cordage, basketry materials to primitive archery supplies. Haines’s “primitive skills” approach applies to his presentation of edible and medicinal plants as well: he favors simple preparations and processing methods that require little or no specialized modern equipment.

As might be expected from a botanist like Haines (and as is needed for a truly accurate plant reference), scientific names are predominant in the text, but readers whose Latin is a bit rusty need not fear, as common names are provided as well. Plant descriptions, however, are left intentionally brief with the expectation that users will accompany this volume with one of the many existing plant identification guides. (Haines’s other works, including the Flora of Maine, are among the more technical guides on the market.)

The “Volume 1” in the subtitle leaves me hoping that it will not be too long before we can enjoy more in this vein from the author. Note that Ancestral Plants is self-published and not currently available through large distributors but can be ordered from the author here.

Matt Peters

© 2011 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America

If you’re going to get a casual reader interested in a 442-page history of anything, you’d better have an engaging subject matter. Fortunately for Eric Jay Dolin, the fur trade is inherently interesting. Love the industry or hate it, it stimulates a response in people. Combine the interesting subject matter with underreported historical insights and you’ve got the recipe for a successful nonfiction book.

Fur, Fortune, and Empire makes the point that the America we know today wouldn’t exist without the fur trade. For instance, without beaver pelts to subsidize their settlement, the pilgrims wouldn’t have survived in Plymouth. Many cities across the Northeast – from Springfield, Massachusetts to Augusta, Maine – started as fur-trading posts and are in their present locations because of the matrix of wetlands and rivers that provided the furs to support them. Fur trappers led the western expansion of America; certainly Europeans would have ended up colonizing the entire continent even without the fur trade, but they wouldn’t have done it in the patterns, or at the speed, or in the manner in which they did were it not for furbearing animals and the trappers who chased them.

Dolin writes like a historian, which is to say that the book is not exactly a page turner. He’s thorough, though, which is the key to any history book. And the information is balanced, insightful, and surprising. The Indians are portrayed in a clear-eyed way: both as victims of European colonialism and participants in the rampant exploitation of the continent’s fur resources. White trappers of that era get a similar treatment: they were exploitive business men who presided over the near extermination of many furbearing animal species, yes, but like real human beings, they were multifaceted characters. For instance, we learn about the “Rocky Mountain College,” where mountain men would meet on long winter evenings to debate the issues of the day – a far cry from the East coast cliché that held that mountain men were monosyllabic brutes who traipsed around with purchased Indian squaw brides. (Not that this cliché isn’t without some truth.)

The diversity found in the Indians and mountain men was reflected in the fur industry they sustained. We learn that the Hudson Bay fur company was a pioneer in wildlife conservation – they used a one-year-on, two-years-off quota system that ensured a sustainable harvest of beavers in present day Canada. This same company also instituted a scorched-earth campaign in other parts of the continent, where they turned to ecological genocide in an effort to create a beaver-free buffer around their fur holdings in the American Northwest, but you get the idea that Dolin isn’t trying to create heroes, or villains, or victims, he is just trying to be true to the facts/anecdotes as he found them. By avoiding a judgmental retelling of the history, a reader feels that he or she is getting the straight dope of what really went on.

Dolin stays far away from contemporary squabbles between trappers and PETA types. This history starts in colonial days and ends at the dawn of the 20th century – a time frame known in naturalist circles as the “age of extermination.” In some ways it’s unfortunate that he didn’t keep going, as the 20th century was, for many species, an age of recovery. By ending the story with the fall of the beaver, we get no sense that today, beaver populations in many places have fully recovered and in some cases exceed pre-colonial levels. But, when you’ve already committed 442 pages to a thorough, engaging account of a 200-year timeframe, I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere.

Joseph Adams

© 2011 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.