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Show ' " I. ! MP M f -w ii ill fiiMXft - VaAi HM WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK By LEMUEL F. PARTON (Consolidated Features WNU Service.) VIEW YORK. We are quite cer- tain that there is a chipping sparrow out our way which didn't stand still long enough to be counted, count-ed, but at any Stuffed Bird Cuts rate Roger Peterson's Count Tory Peter-To Peter-To 5,750,000,000 son's national ' ' ' bird count of 5,750,000,000 receives respectful, even admiring attention, and no challenges or quibbles about it. Concurrently the National Audubon Audu-bon society, of which Mr. Peterson is educational director, begins a drive for the protection of birds and other wild life in defense areas. At the age of 26, Mr, Peterson , proved that bird lore can be made to yield a lot more than mere bird seed. That was in 1934, when he published his book, "Field Guide to the Birds." As bird books go it was a best-seller, warmly praised not only by the somewhat esoteric eso-teric cult of bird-fanciers, but by a much wider public, which appreciated its clarity and simplicity. sim-plicity. There came other edi- ' tions and then his "Field Guide to Birds of the West," and his "Junior Book of Birds," of 1939. All in all, Mr. Peterson's books and magazine articles were so successful that he has had plenty plen-ty of time to count birds even five billions of them. He not only writes but illustrates his books, having emerged from the New York Art Students' league as a highly qualified decorative artist He is known as the best American authority on field identification of birds. Mr. Peterson had an adventure at the convention of the society at Cape May last year, which, so far as we can learn, was not picked up by the news hawks at the time. It seems a group of ornithologists, Pe- 1 terson included, got up at 4:30 to clock a scheduled hawk migration. It didn't come off and all were downhearted until a rumor got around that a black-necked stilt had been seen near the lighthouse pond. There had been no stilt in this section sec-tion since 1870. The party set out for the spot. Finally far across the pond, inaccessible to any dry land approach, ap-proach, the bird was sighted. Mr. Peterson said it would be necessary to approach as near as possible, disturb the bird, and then observe its flight carefully. care-fully. He and William Fish volunteered vol-unteered to brave the mud and cold. They waded in, and at times were up to their armpits in slimy mud. Finally Peterson waved his arms at the stilt. It didn't move. Approaching nearer, near-er, they discovered it was as stiff as a plank. The convention finally ran down the story. The National Academy of Sciences at Philadelphia had had a housecleaning and heaved out a lot of stuffed birds. Some rival bird fans of the Delaware valley had retrieved re-trieved the stilt and set it up across the pond. UP IN Maine, on last summer's holiday, this writer talked with an old road-side philosopher who was concerned with problems arising aris-ing from the Prof. Perry Boldly lengthening Trumpets an 'Old life - span in Age Movement' En" "They don't do much dyin' up here," he said. "Down at West Newton, they had to shoot an old feller, just to start a graveyard." Professor Ralph Barton Perry, Per-ry, of the faculty of philosophy of Harvard university, is similarly simi-larly concerned about old age, but for a different reason. In a brilliant essay in a recent issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Week-ly, he rallies the oldsters against being "hustled around by their juniors in politics; he notes the capitulation of wise old age to bumptious youth, and challenges chal-lenges Rabbi Ben Ezra by in-. in-. sis ting that there's no use growing grow-ing old with him, or anybody else, if old-age Is to be merely a tolerated short-ender in the life sweepstakes. "The most striking evidence of the downfall down-fall of the aged," writes Professor Profes-sor Perry, "is to be found in the domestic circle." "The authority of the father was first broken by the mother, and the children poured through the breach. The last remnant of paternal authority au-thority was the period in which the father was an ogre, who came home at the end of the day to deal with major offenses. He was no longer magistrate, only executioner. "But even this role disappeared when domestic criminology was modernized and the child's insubordination insubor-dination was regarded as a personality person-ality problem, to be solved by love, hygiene and psychoanalysis." |
