More than once, Peterson wrote that he wanted to emulate Peter Matthiessen, to write more subjective and introspective essays. When he asked Paul Brooks, his editor at Houghton Mifflin, how to go about this, Brooks reportedly said, “If you don’t know, it would take too long to tell you”—a case of a friend and editor kindly saying “let it be.”

Peterson’s strength was writing with care and clarity. Rough drafts (housed in the Roger Tory Peterson Institute) show that he revised often and well—particularly on the sentence level. But for the most part, he avoided “writerly” and literary devices such as ornamentation, irony, indirection, and what he disparagingly called “subconscious content.”

But there are essays out there that are memorable for their style and impact. Birds Over America, which won the Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 1950, contains his best prose—most notably in “Trailing America’s Rarest Bird” and “Rain Shadows of the Mexican Border.” “High Seas in a Rowboat,” published in Audubon Magazine (Jan/Feb 1962) is another good example.

As for the pieces that appeared in Bird Watcher’s Digest, the most expressive moments occur in the company of death, his friends’ and his own, especially in the retelling of his near-drowning “Capsized by a Rogue Wave.” In these pieces on mortality, he makes a consistent correspondence between species’ mortality and human mortality, between species’ recovery and “resurrection.”

I’ve not seen the posthumous collection of essays in question, but I have read all of Peterson’s BWD pieces. They were published in a period in his life when writing wasn’t a prime interest. Peterson was a man of passion, and his passions shifted. In his later years, it was photography, during his association with Mill Pond Press in the late 1970s-early 1980s, it was painting. His peak writing years occurred after his Army discharge through the next two decades. An even better posthumous collection might have selected essays from other sources as well in order to give readers a clear picture of Peterson’s periodical writing.