A Mystery Guest Visits My Yard

Last week a little brown bird with speckles walked very slowly through my yard. He looked like a heron, but I hadn't seen his kind in all the time I've lived in Florida.

Eastern Birds  |  Peterson

I consulted a Peterson Field Guide and discovered that he was an immature Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. When he's fully grown, he'll become black, gray and white, and look very different.

Eastern Birds  |  Peterson

The immature Black-Crowned Night Heron would look very similar, but the speckles would be a bit larger.

My sister-in-law, Alice, allowed me to share a heron crest feather that she collected. It is the essence of aerodynamics.

rtpi.org

The Peterson Field Guides are amazing books, and these are just a few of them.

usgs.gov

In 1934, Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996) wrote and illustrated the first major modern field guide, Guide to the Birds, and the first edition sold out in one week. He went on to write or edit a whole nature series, and his work is continued today through the Roger Tory Peterson Institute.

I quote from a short article in Wikipedia:

Paul R. Ehrlich, in The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds (Fireside. 1988), said this about Peterson:

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.

Peterson received many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, nominations for the Nobel Prize, and numerous honorary doctorates.