Foreword
by Robert Bateman
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Roger Tory Peterson was born in Jamestown, New York, on August 28, 1908. The bird artist in him began in 1919 in the seventh grade. He relates the story: "Miss Hornbeck gave each of us a small watercolor box and a Louis Agassiz Fuertes color plate from the portfolio Birds of New York. I was given the blue jay to copy. When our efforts were finished they were put on the blackboard  . . .  but my blue jay was credited to Edith Soule, the girl who sat across the aisle. I was upset and made it plain that it was mine." That same spring he saw a Yellow-shafted Flicker, exhausted from its migration, like a lump of brown feathers. He poked it. "I saw the red patch on the head and those wild eyes in the moment before it flew away. The contrast between what I thought was dead and what was very much alive made an enormous impression on me. It was like a resurrection that touched one so deeply that ever since then birds seem to me to be the most vivid expression of life." The eloquence of that last sentence sums up the artist, the naturalist, the thinker, and the communicator. All of these qualities seemed to be part of him all of the time.

In 1922, he bought his first camera (a Primo No. 9 4 x 5" plate camera) and his first binocular (four-power opera glasses). The following year he began his first bird list, which grew to almost 5,000 during his lifetime. At the age of 17, he went to work at the Union Furniture Factory in Jamestown, to decorate Chinese lacquer cabinets. From 1927 to 1928, he studied drawing at the Art Students League in New York City. His drawing and painting studies continued at the National Academy of Design from 1929 to 1931.