Foreword
by Robert Bateman
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His awards are numerous: 23 honorary doctorate degrees, the Conservation Medal of the National Audubon Society, the Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund, the Linnaeus Gold Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy, and Master Bird Artist at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin. Most prestigious was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to an American civilian and presented by Jimmy Carter in 1980. But the greatest honor of all will always be his place in the hearts, minds, and eyes of birders the world over. The idea that you could put in your pocket information that would open the door to understanding and enjoying the wonders of life on our planet is a very powerful notion indeed. That little 1934 book has gone from strength to strength through its various editions. Every species has been sweated over, brush stroke by brush stroke.

In 1976, Roger's wife, Virginia Marie Peterson, began an exhaustive study of bird distribution in North America for maps in the revised eastern field guide (390 maps done in three years) and the revised western field guide (440 maps done in six years). This couple worked and traveled as a team for the last decades of Roger's life. My wife, Birgit, and I were privileged to travel with them in various parts of the world. I recall an incident that illustrates Roger's acute ability to pay attention to nature. We were standing with a group of Lindblad travelers in a Tokyo park, waiting to tour a nobleman's house. We were all chatting, and Roger was half-listening to us and totally listening to nature. At a lull in the conversation, he said, "I am not sure, there are either four or five different species of cicada singing at this moment." He didn't know their names, but he distinguished between their songs.

A major culmination of the couple's teamwork resulted in the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in his hometown of Jamestown, New York. It was dedicated in 1993 as an educational beacon for teachers and for the study of nature. Peterson said, "We must reach all mentors of children, their teachers and those who teach teachers. We must give them the tools and instill in them a responsibility for creating in their young charges a knowledge and love of nature." As Baba Dioum, an African environmentalist, says, "In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught."