Knowing a Hawk From a Handsaw
Like Emily Post's "Etiquette" and Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Roger Tory Peterson's "A Field Guide to the Birds" (1934) was both revolutionary and egalitarian. It opened the door to a rarefied world of patterns and facts, inviting the ignorant and the ambitious alike to take part in something that had previously seemed impenetrable or academic—or the province of a leisured class. Indeed, a year before Peterson's book came out, a bird-watcher was elected president of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who wanted to put a chicken in every pot, was an accomplished birder.
There were already many kinds of birding guides to be had when Peterson's book was published, ranging from scientific tomes on ornithology to wordy volumes detailing the minute differences between species to anthropomorphic portraits of our feathered friends. (In the immensely popular "The Bird Book" of 1897, the female mourning dove is described as "gentle and refined in manners, but slack and incompetent in all she does. Her nest consists of a few loose sticks."
Artists, of course, had been capturing the likenesses of birds for centuries. There was no reason that John James Audubon's 19th-century masterwork, "The Birds of America," couldn't be used as an authoritative reference. But it was not something you'd want to lug into the field with a pair of binoculars.
None of the available options were. As Peterson wrote in the preface to his first edition, here was "a 'boiling-down,' or simplification . . . so that any bird could be readily and surely told from all others at a glance or at a distance." With more than 800 bird species in North America, that "from all others" was no small thing. Peterson's illustrations were clean and clear; he used little black arrows to point out the one or two characteristics unique to each species. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out in a week.
One must remember that, up until 1916, when the Migratory Bird Treaty made it illegal to shoot all but game birds, most serious birding was done with a gun. A bird in the hand reveals details and colorations that the best optics cannot find. In the 19th century, the primal pleasure of the hunt was behind much of birding; even the great Audubon killed tens of thousands of birds he did not need. Wealthy men, young and old, built museum-quality collections of taxidermy that proclaimed their sovereignty in the world. The terrible imbalance of a 5-inch female warbler up against a loaded shotgun was masked in euphemisms of ravishment: "I took her," the hunter said, never "I killed her."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304203604577397871538852242.html
