Volume 54, Number 7 · April 26, 2007
Hero of Birdland
By John Terborgh
All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures
by Roger Tory Peterson, edited by Bill Thompson III
Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp., $30.00
According to the US Forest Service, 70 million Americans call themselves bird-watchers, making bird-watching one of the most popular leisure activities of our time. It hasn't always been so. A century ago, bird-watching as it is practiced today didn't exist. There were no field guides to help identify birds and binoculars were clumsy, expensive, and optically primitive by today's standards. The records people kept of the birds they sighted had no credibility. To prove you'd seen a bird you had to shoot it and prepare it as a specimen. Amateur enthusiasts gathered information about birds but largely through the now outlawed hobby of oology—egg collecting. For the oologist, the rarer the bird, the more desirable was its clutch of eggs. Oologists contributed to sharp declines in several species, including the peregrine falcon.
Review, 4309 words
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