Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

It's time for the next round in the Babe Ruth of Ornithology. For those of you who are wondering, this will carry over into the new year because what use would a tournament be if it stopped at the end of December?! Anyway, this weeks challengers are, the Messiah of birding himself, Roger Tory Peterson and one of the most successful women naturalists in American history, Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey! Let the battle commence! "Feed the birds. Tuppence a bag. Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag..." Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996) is regarded by many in the American birding community as being the greatest birder that ever lived. People can try to imitate him, but the man staked his claim on the work of other greats in the field of ornithology to provide an easily understood platform with which beginners, experts, and everyone in between could utilize in order to properly identify birds in the field. He got his inspiration to create his own field guide after repeated ...

Ludlow Griscom (1890-1959) while not as famous as Concord's Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, his presence is still appreciated by ornithologists and birders who have graced a local library and perhaps found a curious volume called "Birds of Concord". The book itself isn't a field guide, but instead a reference for any bird lover that wished at the time to better understand the mechanisms behind bird abundance and rarity as well as why migration occurred and what birds were considered common in this small, but rigorously surveyed portion of Massachusetts. Griscom himself was one of the first ornithologists to shift away from "shotgun ornithology" and instead use the field marks present on a bird body to determine its identity. Around the time of Griscom, it was common for those studying birds to have to shoot them in order to tender an identification of the bird in hand. This was certainly true for smaller, harder to see songbirds like sp...