Rethinking Our Relationship to Nature, 1920–1959 101
DOCUMENT 86: Roger Tory Peterson on
Bird Population (1948)The noted ornithologist and author of the popular Field Guides Roger Tory Peterson raised people’s
awareness of how human activity, including the changes that people make in their environment, affect wildlife
populations, forcing some species to dwindle and enabling others to multiply. His books offered an innovative
means of identifying birds—one that eliminated the need to shoot and collect them in order to be certain of
their identity. His books also moved interest in bird-watching— or “birding,” as it is popularly referred to—
from the pastime of a few hundred to the passion of 47 million Americans.^3 For many people, birding proved
to be but the first step in the development of environmental consciousness.Every ornithologist I know would give his
soul to step back into time and walk the [North
American] continent in the historic year of 1492.
It was all virgin country then, with trees centu-
ries old and the native grass waist high on the
prairies. The broad distributional concepts—the
life zones or the biomes—probably would have
been much more satisfactory in those days when
most environments were in relatively stable “cli-
maxes,” as the old mature plant associations are
called. But that was before man set in motion
the constant chain of changes that take place
wherever he goes. For civilized man is the great
disturber. Some would call him a destroyer, but
that I think is a harsh term. Certainly he brings
change.
Let us look briefly at the score sheet and see
which way our birds are going.
Most of the waterfowl and the native upland
game birds are below par. There has been some
restoration in places, but there were many more
of them in primitive America. Even twentieth-
century America could support more than it
does. Hunting often exacts a greater toll than
the traffic will bear.
Today all marsh birds, not waterfowl alone,
are in the red. The records show that close to
100,000,000 acres of land have been drained in
the United States for agriculture alone. Other
millions of acres have been ditched to control
mosquitoes. Considering that a marsh or swamp
habitat harbors nine or ten nesting birds per acre
and most farming country an average of fewer
than three, this means that at least half a billion
birds may have been eliminated from the face of
the continent by the simple process of digging
ditches.
The birds of prey—the hawks and the
owls—are much reduced.... [T]he gunner
often blamed the growing scarcity of game
not on himself but on the natural predators,
which had lived in satisfactory adjustment to
their prey for thousands of years. He called all
hawks “vermin,” competitors to be shot and
destroyed. And the skies over most of America
today are still not empty enough of hawks to
satisfy him.
The vultures, on the other hand, seem to be
spreading.Source: Roger Tory Peterson, Birds over America (New
York: Dodd, Mead, 1948), pp. 71-73.