Peterson, Roger Tory (1908–1996)

US ornithologist. His Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America (1934), with its novel and easy-for-the-novice pointers on how to identify birds, became a major best-seller. He was art editor for Audubon magazine from 1934–43. During World War II, the Army Air Force adapted his bird-spotting methods to aircraft identification. From the late 1940s, he edited a series of field guides, lectured, and continued to publish his own works, among them Birds over America (1948), How to Know the Birds (1949), and A Bird Watcher's Anthology (1957). Wild America (1957) was an account of a journey along the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts from Maine to Alaska. Peterson's guides and other work gave him wide influence in building popular awareness of wildlife conservation and environmental protection.

He was born in Jamestown, New York. He began observing and drawing birds as a boy, and pursued an artist's education in New York, New York, at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. He taught art and science in Brookline, Massachusetts, for several years He founded the Roger Tory Peterson Institute for the Study of Natural History in 1986.