2016 read #57: Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher.

Wild America: The Record of a 30,000 Mile Journey Around the Continent by a Distinguished Naturalist and His British Colleague by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher
427 pages
Published 1955
Read from July 17 to July 22
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

In my library's meager science section, there are few books that interest me that I haven't yet read. There are a fair number of primers on space or maths or volcanoes, quite a few pop-science cash-ins from journalists on the mediagenic controversies of the past fifteen years, and of course the inevitable pile of science biographies, but informative and non-sensationalized texts on life science, non-volcanic geology and Earth history, weather and climate, and so on are rather lacking (or, in some cases, merely outdated). It's a systemic problem in modern publishing, from what I can gather; the thirty-seventh book dissecting the personal theology of Charles Darwin will move more copies than an erudite and educational overview of plant and insect coevolution, because general readers are ignorant and have poor taste. (Sorry, the 2016 Republican National Convention just happened, and I'm feeling particularly gloomy about the wherewithal of the common American.)

One of the few interesting books I haven't already gobbled down is called Return to Wild America, by Scott Weidensaul, author of the overly imaginative yet compelling history The First Frontier. Weidensaul's Return was a Bush-era follow-up to none other than this here volume, commemorating its fiftieth anniversary. I'm something of a stickler (or stick in the mud) when it comes to doing my homework; I felt obligated to read Peterson and Fisher before I permitted myself Weidensaul. It wasn't merely a desire to do my due diligence, either -- an ecology book that merited a book-length revisit on its fiftieth anniversary sounded right up my alley, perhaps a classic work up there with A Sand County Almanac (or, at the very least, A Natural History of North American Trees).

Plus, how could I say no to reading a book that shared a title with my favorite PBS nature serial of the late 1980s?

It turns out that Wild America is... not very illuminating. The book is more of a 1950s road trip memoir, something like Travels with Charley but with birds instead of social commentary. The two authors play cute with some minor odd couple hijinks, run a running joke about Coca-Cola into the ground, offer some spiffy gee-whiz optimism about newfangled audio tours in museums and newfangled "rational exploitation" of fur seals in their breeding grounds, and in general careen about like two well-to-do white guys with a brand new car and three months to spare chasing birds for a living.

A good ecology book would tell you, the general reader, something about how each species might fit into its environment or make a broader point of scientific interest from the specific example. Even the aforementioned Natural History of American Trees delved into the ecology and life cycles of its subjects in fascinating ways, despite being little more than an extended index of tree species. Wild America, by contrast, offers little more than lists and basic descriptions of the birds the authors saw. There are times when the description of nature or scenery is evocative, almost seeming to deserve a revisit fifty years later, but for the most part, it reads like a birding checklist padded out with incidents of travel and casual condescension toward women, Indians, and Inuit. The result is very 1950s, like a prolonged National Geographic piece, a curious relic rather than a document with much to say to the present.