Artist, author, and influential conservationist Roger Tory Peterson pioneered the modern age of bird watching with his breakthrough 1934 book, A Field Guide to the Birds. Until Peterson came along, field guides were largely the work of ornithologists whose highly technical descriptions were only marginally helpful to the small numbers of recreational birders at the time. Suddenly, with Peterson’s book, birders, as they have come to be known, had clear, useful images, with arrows pointing to the distinguishing feature or features of each species, painstakingly painted by the author. Even with the country deep in the Great Depression, that first printing of Peterson’s book sold out in days. Peterson was born in Jamestown, NY, on August 28, 1908, a child of Charles Gustav Peterson and Henrietta Bader Peterson. He spent his young adult years in New England and New York City, and in 1954 Peterson moved to a home beside the Connecticut River in Old Lyme, where he lived for 42 years until his death at age 87 in 1996. “I’m basically a teacher,” he told an interviewer four years before his death. “I like to think of myself as an artist and a teacher. A teacher who uses visual methods, not the academic kind. My background is not that basically of a teacher, it is that of an artist.”