Rarae Aves

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF TEXAS (304 pp.) -- Roger Tory Peferson --Houghton Mifflin, for the Texas Game and Fish Commission ($3).

A new bestseller is in the making. Without advertising, and despite a sales system that seems designed to discourage all but the most determined customers, the Texas Field Guide has sold more than 6,000 copies--more than some bestselling novels. The author: Roger Tory Peterson, 51, the U.S.'s top birdman, whose wrinkle-ringed blue eyes (no spectacles except for close work) can distinguish between a harlequin duck and a common scoter half a mile away.

The latest Peterson publishing venture had its origins in a bad case of frustration. Though Texans were confident that they had the most, the biggest and the rarest North American birds, with the whooping crane ready to whoop agreement each fall, they felt neglected during the last quarter-century, when bird watching in the U.S. developed from a risible oddity to an often rugged sport. The trouble was an embarrassment of riches. A Yankee or Floridian could count on identifying any bird he saw with nothing more cumbersome than his binoculars and a single pocket volume, Peterson's Eastern Field Guide to the Birds. An Idahoan or Californian had the same assurance with Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds. But Texas is where, ornithologically, East meets West, and North America meets near-tropical Mexico. The conscientious Texas birder needed both Peterson books --or all three volumes of Richard H. Pough's Audubon Bird Guides--and by the time he had riffled all the pages, the exciting "lifer'' (i.e., a new bird) had probably flown away still unidentified.

Five years ago, the Texas Game and Fish Commission asked Birder Peterson to do something about the situation, put up $60,000 and now can boast the best bird guide in the Western Hemisphere (but for three years the book can be bought only from the Game and Fish Commission; money must be sent with the order to Austin, Texas--no C.O.D.s). The Texas guide demonstrates once again why the Peterson volumes are rarae aves in the book trade. When the first modest edition of the Eastern volume appeared in 1934, it sold an unexpected 7,000 copies in its first year, more than the National Audubon Society's total membership at the time (now 33,000). Since then Peterson's Eastern guide has sold more than 525,000 copies, is running at 46,000 a year, while the Western guide has sold 165,000.

The success of the Peterson guides lies in their difference from earlier bird books, which were primarily artistic (like Audubon's) or coldly scientific treatises on dead specimens in museums. Peterson, a sometime art student and teacher, got the idea (from Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages') for schematic representations of birds as they are usually seen--at a distance, in flight or bobbing on the water. He has refined the idea into what he calls "the Peterson system." Under this system, major groups of birds are distinguished by obvious, overall characteristics. As he points out in the Texas volume, for instance, loons are "open-water swimming birds with pointed, daggerlike bills. Larger than most ducks . . . float low in water''; despite its name, the common loon is "rare south of Corpus Christi." Shrikes are "songbirds with hawklike behavior and hook-tipped bills'"; the loggerhead species is widespread in Texas, but the Northern shrike has been recorded in only five of the state's 254 counties.

After these broad strokes come successively finer, heavily italicized distinctions: the blue-gray gnatcatcher "looks like a miniature mockingbird. A very tiny, slender mite, even smaller than a chickadee, blue-gray above and whitish below . . . long, contrastingly colored tail." It migrates through the whole of Texas, winters in the southern part, breeds in the northern. The black-tailed gnatcatcher has "less white on tail." Among the robin's maculate cousins, "the reddish tail is the hermit thrush's mark." The deadpan statement, "red eye is of little aid," has nothing to do with liquor but refers to the red-eyed vireo -- better "characterized by the gray cap and the black-bordered white 'eyebrow' stripe."

All in all, Author Peterson, who is credited with the All-America record for having seen 572 species of birds in a single year, finds Texas bird life more varied than any other state's. It includes such bait for bird watchers as the caracara (an oddball falcon that eats carrion), the chachalaca (only guan in North America), the roadrunner (a giant, snake-killing cuckoo) and the jagana (a long-toed "lily trotter"). Altogether, there are 487 different "basic species" which occur regularly, plus 55 accidentals (recorded fewer than five times), for a grand total of 542 species. This leaves California, notes Birder Peterson, "a poor second with nearly 100 fewer specimens."

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