Laura Erickson's For the Birds

One of the pleasures of long winter nights or blizzardy days is curling up with a good book. Right now a great old book from mid-century is warming those cold dark hours of the newest century.

Back in 1953, Roger Tory Peterson and the British ornithologist James Fisher combed the continent in search of as many birds as they could find. Fisher had shown Peterson a lot of the wild sights of Europe, and in return Peterson planned a hundred day, 30,000 mile trip to show Fisher our North American birds. They met in April in Newfoundland, headed south to New England, and traced the Eastern seaboard, then moved across the South, dipping down into Mexico, and then headed to the Pacific coast, which they followed to Alaska, ending the adventure in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

The book Wild America is their account of their travels. Peterson begins each chapter tracing their journey, and then generously excerpts Fisher’s journal to give both men’s perspective. It’s a rich and immediate recounting of a rich and glorious adventure, and we get a feel for the human as well as the wild America of the 50s. In the end, Fisher asks what about the journey made the deepest impression on him as an Englishman. It wasn’t the scenery, the birds, or North America’s oldest human inhabitants living their ancient ways on the mesas of Arizona, but rather was America’s more recent human immigrants. He wrote:

We Europeans who have not visited North Americans in their homes, read of them and see what their movies show us. Many of us get half a light on half a life—the dollar half. Rugged individualism, Private Enterprise, Showmanship, Power Politics. We do not see so well the rugged altruism, the public spirit, the guardianship, the fair dealing of the American at home. Why should they talk about what they take for granted? They talk to us of their doubts and difficulties, of their troubles and quarrels, old and new. We see them (forgive us) more as brave warriors, daring fliers, successful sportsmen, gunmen, lovers, than as builders, scientists, husbandmen, husbands.

They show us too little of their earthly paradise, and publicize too little their determination to share it with wild nature. Perhaps they have forgotten that they dedicated their National Parks before we in England had even one little, local , private nature-protection society. Or perhaps they think that to tell of these things would arouse again our not-so-secret resentment at the boast that all that the Americans have is bigger and better, and all that they do is swifter and surer. But do we resent it? Maybe. “If you feel the way you say you do about what you’ve seen,” said Roger, “you tell them, not me.”

And this is what I’ve tried to do—to tell of Wild America, and say that I have never seen such wonders or met landlords so worthy of their land. They have had, and still have, the power to ravage it, and have instead made it a garden.

Looking at this America of the past, and seeing many elements the same, some wonderfully improved, some woefully worse, has been a mind-expanding journey for me. Wild America has been reprinted in paperback, and the original 1953 edition is still available in public libraries. I strongly recommend it.