It’s among the most familiar phrases in any field guide, Roger Tory Peterson’s description of the adult male purple finch as
like a Sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.
As a fan of both sparrows and raspberry juice, I can’t say that I really get it, but it’s a thoroughly memorable and justly famous line, cited over and over in just about anything written since about these lovely feeder visitors.
Of course, it’s not Peterson’s.
Nowhere that I know of does he attribute the phrase to its source, though he does — as is the case for most of the uncredited quotes in early editions of the field guides — enclose it in single quotation marks.
Happily, the poet Allan Burns filled us in some years ago on the ultimate origin of the Petersonian comparison. In June 1866, nearly seven decades before the Field Guide, John Burroughs published his essay “In the Hemlocks.” “Most people receive with incredulity,” he wrote, “a statement of the number of birds that annually visit our climate.” But they are many, and among them is
the purple finch or linnet…. His color is peculiar, and looks as if it might have been imparted by dipping a brown bird in diluted pokeberry juice. Two or three more dippings would have made the purple complete.
The inspiration is obvious, but we still have to get somehow from Burroughs’s brown bird and pokeweed to Peterson’s sparrow (“Sparrow”!) and raspberries.
Neltje Blanchan, whose sesquicentennial nears in 2015, was one of the most successful and influential nature writers of the turn of the twentieth century — and like most of her colleagues, an avowed devotee of John Burroughs, whom she credits, rightly, with having
awaken[ed] the popular enthusiasm for out-of-door life generally and for birds particularly, which is one of the signs of our times.
In her Wild Birds Worth Knowing, published by Doubleday in 1917, Blanchan (who wrote under that name even after marrying her publisher) repeatedly cited Burroughs by name. When it came to the purple finch, however, she took his pokeweed analogy as a springboard for her own fantasy:
Old rose is more nearly the color of this finch which looks like a brown sparrow that had been dipped in a bath of raspberry juice and left out in the sun to fade.
Could this be the hitherto unrecognized missing link between Peterson and Burroughs? It is.
Blanchan complains, in her winning and witty way, that
it would seem as if the people who named most of our birds and wild flower must have been color-blind. Old rose is more nearly the color….
And what does Peterson write, a decade and a half later?
Purple is hardly the word; raspberry or old-rose is more like it.
So far as I’ve been able to determine, Burroughs never (risky word, that) used the words “old rose” to describe a color, certainly not the color of a purple finch.
Blanchan does, though, and I am more than satisfied that she is the immediate source — Burroughs the ultimate source — for that memorable line in the Field Guide.
It oversimplifies, badly, the function of intertextuality in natural history writing to speak of “plagiarism.” But I do wish that Roger Tory Peterson had mentioned Neltje Blanchan in the acknowledgments of the Field Guide. Plagiarism? No. Bad form? You decide.
