My Wild Life: Rare-Birds, Close Calls, and Adventures of an Eco-Explorer: A Memoir, Review by Rick Cech

To be honest, many nature books are relatively generic; anyone with decent penmanship and a little research effort probably could produce them. Not so Peter Alden’s recently published My Wild Life: Rare-Birds, Close Calls, and Adventures of an Eco-Explorer: A Memoir. This is a highly personal Baedeker, bursting with accounts of worldwide experiences that are anything but generic. This is fitting for Peter’s memoir, since (as anyone who knows him can readily attest) Peter in real life presents a unique combination of bold, larger-than-life adventurism, set alongside a studied and quite thoughtful approach to recounting his many experiences.

The collision of these two seemingly disparate traits lands with good effect in his new memoir. In it, Peter details his close, lifelong engagement with natural history – from an early childhood fascination in the 1950s, to his pioneering of many new frontiers in ecotourism worldwide (mainly in the 1970s-1980s), to more recent pursuits such as co-founding the first bioblitzes alongside E.O. Wilson.

Along the way, his path has been well-supplied with a stream of memorable personal adventures. Some of these (such as his encounter with former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger in observing the Ross’ Gull found in Newburyport, MA in 1971), are legendary in his peer birding community, even though at times he has toned down a few of the more colorful details in print.

During his eco-tourism career, Peter’s positioning has always been along the cutting edge. Like a real-world Zelig, he was present in nearly every venue where new developments in field natural history study were taking place, from Central and South America to Africa, Southeast Asia and Antarctica. His experiences illustrate, in personal terms, a generation of evolving natural history tourism that seldom has received such detailed attention, especially in a discussion this broadly encompassing.

It is particularly interesting to learn (or, in some cases, to recall) the privations facing early neotropical naturalists in the modern era. Without illustrated field guides, Peter often was obliged to create cut-and-paste looseleaf notebooks of species information to support his activities. In illustrating tour lectures (given off-hours to trip participants), he would cart along as many as 5,000+ color slides. Further, in early days, there was little available eco-lodging, poorly developed local transportation options, and few individuals with on-sight observation skills – to say nothing of the absence of the internet, GPS, cell phones, email, PowerPoint, advanced photo optics / sound equipment, and readily available field ID resources.

Peter’s book is designed to appeal to a range of readers. The first is eco-tourism beginners, for whom he provides a great deal of patiently detailed and useful background information (including cultural and ecological features, as well as indicating target bird species). While his many tales of derring-do and near calamity may startle those accustomed to a tamer range of field experiences, they remind us that nature remains wild; and for many, this is a core attraction.

The second audience group is experienced local field naturalists looking for ideas as to where they might travel abroad. For this group, the book is an excellent primer. And the list of travel possibilities is truly vast.

The third group is veteran natural history travelers, for whom the narratives are likely to provoke moments of nostalgia, along with an opportunity to compare Peter’s many adventures with their own (including encounters with memorable natural history pioneers). Among the significant figures of the era Peter encountered include Roger Tory Petertsen, Robert Ridgely, Ted Parker, Arnold Small, the Leaky family, Jane Goodall, Ernst Mayr, E.O. Wilson, and Peter Matthiessen, to name just a few. Also luminaries from the NYC area, such as Tom Davis, Stuart Keith, Michel Kleinbaum, and Guy Tudor. Thus, the book is both an encyclopedia of prime international nature sites, as well as a Who’s Who of the mid-century natural history community.

In the third group (and now from an entirely personal point of view), I have visited many of the sites Peter described, especially in the neotropics, but mainly in search of butterflies, more so than birds. Yet many of our travel experiences have been strikingly similar. On the Napo River in Peru, which Peter describes, there was the day when the back panel of our peki-peki (a small canoe-style boat, named for the sound of its one-cylinder outboard motor) fell off, leaving us stranded for an extended time along an isolated riverbank. Or, on another trip, when water levels in the river were low, we had to leap from the boat to lift the hull over rocks along a scratchy stretch of rapids. Or, the time I had to aggressively elbow a young tour bus driver sitting beside me on a treacherous dirt road in the eastern Andes near Cuzco. The young man had dozed off just as we were approaching a hairpin turn, with a thousand foot drop off just off the shoulder. Somehow these adventures seldom end in peril, but they underscore the fact that unpredictability still remains in the natural world. Thanks to Peter for stirring these recollections, among many others.

A final thought. I was intrigued by Peter’s report that, in scouting tour sites in Mexico in 1971, a young local boy alerted him to “the butterflies” in a nearby valley in the state of Michoacán. Being more interested in tracking an Imperial Woodpecker, Peter confesses to having forfeited the opportunity to upstage Fred Urquhart in discovering the overwintering site of eastern Monarch butterflies. Had he done so, my late friend Lincoln Brower (a foremost early researcher on the Michoacán Monarchs), most likely would have been regaled among Peter’s long list of friends and associates in this engaging memoir.