Out, Standing In The Field

Day 307 (Part One): Roger Tory Peterson is a name with which any good birdwatcher will be familiar. His field guides are some of the best on the market today, and no field bag is complete without one. A consummate naturalist and artist, RTP's guides delineate what markings to look for in the field where often the birder only gets a brief glance at the subject. With a little training, the observer is quickly able to make distinctions between one species or another based on Peterson's system.

Although I have many field guides on my shelf, "Roger Tory" (as he is known in my household) is the one I turn to first. He sometimes disagrees with the nomenclature in Sibley's works, and I tend to use the Sibley taxonomy because it is more current, but I only use Sibley's images to reinforce identifications.

Roger Tory Peterson, 1908-1996, was outstanding in his field. So am I, given a comma and a space to qualify the statement.