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and new trends in natural science. Readers of Life Magazine have seen 
many of his paintings done on assignment by Life for their spring and 
autumn bird feature stories. Since the war he has been with the Army 
Engineers in the camouflage division. 
Edwin Way Teale gives an entertaining account of Peterson’s career 
in the November-December, 1942, Audubon Magazine. He was born in 
Jamestown, N. Y., in 1908, where he soon became the enfant terrible of the 
town. He claims to have been spanked oftener in sixth grade than any 
other boy in the history of his school. In the second half of the seventh 
grade a sudden change came over him. His science teacher organized a 
Junior Audubon Club and obtained the leaflets which turned his attention 
to nature. From his first Audubon leaflet he tried to draw. He used to 
pull a little express wagon down to the public library and haul home the 
two big volumes of the Birds of New York to study the illustrations by 
Fuertes. Throughout high school he took all the art courses available, and 
earned spending money painting designs on cabinets in one of the city’s 
furniture factories. In this way he earned enough to attend the A.O.U. 
convention in New York City in 1925. There he met the great Fuertes 
himself. Generous as always with ambitious youngsters, Fuertes gave the 
boy one of his brushes and offered to make suggestions if he would send 
him some of his sketches. 
In 1927 Peterson began his art career in earnest, attending classes at 
the Art Students League in New York, and earning expenses in the after- 
noon by painting little Chinamen on lacquered cabinets in a down-town 
furniture shop. Week-ends he roamed the fields and woods chasing birds. 
For three years he taught art and science at the Rivers School at Brook- 
line, Mass., and labored evenings over his Field Guide. The year it was 
published, in 1934, he joined the staff of the Audubon Society, where he has 
been ever since. His book this year won the American Ornithologists’ 
Union’s Brewster Medal, awarded each year for the most important book 
on North or South American birds. 
Peter Markham Scott is the best known of the young English painters. 
He is the son of Robert Falcon Scott, who lost his life.in the Antarctic. 
Before the war, young Scott — he is now only 35 years old lived in an 
old lighthouse on The Wash, a tidal marsh on the North Sea coast of 
England. His lighthouse is a regular stopping place for migratory birds, 
and in addition to these migrants he made pets of some 400 wild geese. 
They even bred on his land, and became so tame that the females 
permitted him to feed them on the nest. With the out-break of the war 
he crated up his tame birds, sent them to the estates of his friends, and 
joined the British Navy. 
As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent his vacations duck 
hunting and sailing along the English coasts, and he has roamed over a 
considerable part of the world, from Hudson Bay to the Caspian Sea, in 
search of the nesting sites of rare geese and ducks. He turned out an 
average of one painting a week. His annual shows at Ackermann’s gallery 
in London were usually sell-outs, some of his paintings going for as much 
as $1,400. His mother, the sculptress Lady Kennett, from whom he ap- 
