Preface
by Virginia Marie Peterson
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In the years before his death, Dr. Peterson and I researched the original map material. My research background involved infrared spectroscopy for the U.S. Coast Guard Research and Development Center, where I developed methods for identifying oil spills. I wrote the original U.S. Coast Guard Infrared Field Manual for Oil Spill Identification. My research on the fifth-edition maps was curtailed in 1997 because of the pressures of settling my husband's estate. Knowing the maps would need current updating, and after conferring with Paul Lehman, I handed over to him my rough maps and all the map data I had collected from experts in every state east of the 100th meridian, plus the eastern Canadian Provinces. Paul's expert map update has given to this fifth edition the most accurate and current information on bird ranges.

This field guide is the culmination of more than 60 years of watchful, careful revisions of the Peterson classic, A Field Guide to the Birds, which was included in The New York Public Library's Books of the Century in 1996. This book and the Peterson Field Guide Series have been credited with being a powerful catalyst for the modern environmental movement. Paul Ehrlich, professor of biology at Stanford University, naturalist, and author of more than 20 books, wrote, "In this century no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson, the inventor of the modern field guide. His greatest contribution to the preservation of biological diversity has been in getting tens of millions of people outdoors with Peterson Field Guides in their pockets."