Foreword
by Robert Bateman
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It is a great honor to be asked to do the introduction for this fifth and final edition of Roger Tory Peterson's "birder's bible," the Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America. Virginia Peterson wrote to me, "Today I was looking at Roger's fifth edition bird plates which he finished some time ago. They are gorgeous." She enclosed a picture of the final plate of flycatchers that he was working on the day he died.

As I look at these final and unfinished images, I am very moved. Many years ago, I visited, deep underground, an ancient tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Karnak in Egypt. One wall had beautifully delineated figures, birds, mammals, and inscriptions. They were finished in color. But as we proceeded through the tomb, some drawings were uncolored and were only outlines, then vague sketches, and finally emptiness. The royal personage had died, and work had stopped. It was all so fresh you could imagine that the artists would come in tomorrow and continue their work. I have the same vivid immediacy as I gaze at this plate of flycatchers. I can see the studio and follow the strokes of the hand of the master. This work in progress implies that Roger's life's work will never finish. Indeed it does go on in the lives and efforts of millions of people. It will never end but will continue to expand like ripples in a pond. That is the criterion for a person's importance. How big and lasting is the circle of ripples that his life has made? Roger Tory Peterson's life has been one of the most important lives of the last 100 years.

Mimi Westervelt, Virginia's daughter, leaves us with a word portrait of her stepfather:

"At age 87, he's crouched down, camera to his eye, in some brush along a wetland focusing on a butterfly. He's just walked through some thorny mass of greenbrier, or thistle, or multiflora rose, and his legs and arms are all scraped up, but he never mentions it. Because he doesn't feel it. His head and neck are thick with insects, but he never flinches. Because he doesn't feel them. He doesn't see them. He doesn't hear them. All he sees is that butterfly. As long as he hadn't just run out of film, Roger knew how to focus."