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A Wild Life: Growing Up in Concord

An excerpt of the beginning of Peter Alden's upcoming memoir, A Wild Life, due out this autumn

I grew up and lived in Concord, Massachusetts, a famous town in many ways. Concord was known for its Revolutionary War efforts and for all the great writers who lived there, including Henry David Thoreau. The fact that Henry, our town hero, was an early avid bird watcher meant a lot to me and still does to this day.


Growing up, I remember we had a window bird feeder visible while we dined. Chickadees, nuthatches, jays, and sparrows were frequent visitors. Later, when flocks of colorful Evening Grosbeaks and bright-red Northern Cardinals joined, I was hooked.


My father, John Alden, was a bird watcher as a youth. He grew up in Newton and was a member of the Brookline Bird Club. He had binoculars, and looked for birds locally and where he summered in New Hampshire. He was the son of a bank president, came from modest wealth, even though they had trouble during the Depression. My father worked as a claim agent for the law department of the Boston & Maine Railroad. He loved railroads and hated airplanes. And he loved the mountains and being out in nature.


This combination of interests led my father to meet my mother on a ski train. Back in the 30s, when nobody had any money, few had cars and gas was expensive, there were Snow Trains. If you wanted to go skiing in New Hampshire, these were special trains just for skiers. You’d go to North Station, stop in Winchester and maybe Lowell, and then deadhead up to North Conway. He was a sort of social director, telling people how to get to the ski lifts and where to have lunch and stuff like that. He was very personable and a humorous person in some ways. One time, talking to some people, a nice older woman said to him “I want you to meet my daughter.” So my grandmother introduced my father to this one woman named Evelyn. They hit it off, got married, and had four children, all boys.


My father's family was involved in the early days of the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He loved mountain climbing, canoeing, and railroads and was only a soft-core casual birder. Whenever he and my brothers went on a hike or climbed a mountain in New Hampshire, such as Mount Osceola in the Waterville Valley, he would show us a Spruce Grouse, a very tame, relatively rare northern grouse. If we saw a Great Blue Heron on a canoe trip, he'd point it out. We climbed every mountain in New Hampshire, basically, including Mount Washington. Having my father enthusiastically show us birds made such excursions more interesting.


When my mother saw how interested I was in birds, she read me a chapter every night from the Burgess Bird Book for Children. The book had paintings by Louis Agassi Fuertes, this great bird artist who ended up at Cornell. We also had at the house, the Portraits of New England Birds, a great big bird art book which was really impressive. That book that was more important to me than the Peterson Field Guide as it had habitat backgrounds not found in Peterson.


I also got interested in stamp collecting worldwide, so I'd go buy packets of used stamps. I already was developing an interest in geography and wanted to visit the whole world. It was simultaneous to bird watching. I was amassing my stamp collection and I knew where Angola was, and I knew where Mozambique was. In Junior High School I got a college-level World Geography textbook which I read from cover to cover. Little did I know at the time, that I would major in Geography in college, became President of the Geography Club, and eventually lead tours to 100 countries.


I was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout, and my younger brother, David, often birded together. Our greatest discovery was looking at a book called The Birds of Concord by Ludlow Griscom. That book highlighted Great Meadows on the other side of town. It was not a national wildlife refuge at the time. We’d get out there and see all these birds that we just wouldn't see anywhere except in a great freshwater marsh.


Our Neighborhood Bird Club
Our Neighborhood Bird Club

And then we had some other friends in town through Little League. Another couple of kids who lived not too far from us, Eddie Wooden and his brother Bobby, and we said, “Hey, we're starting a Bird Club.” We were seven and nine years old. We started doing trips together in Concord by foot and bicycle. As we looked through the different bird books, we noticed all these ocean birds that we just don't get inland. We begged to go to Plum Island and Newburyport to see all these different sea ducks, grebes, and loons that we just don't see inland.


My father finally drove us four boys up to Newburyport. As he was quite religious, a member of the Christian Science church. We're driving up, and we're totally eager. All four of us, wanted to see 10 or 20 “life birds”, a bird you see for the first time in your life. Then my father stops at a church in Newburyport, and all of us have to go in and sing hymns and listen to the readings. We were just fidgeting and bored out of our minds! And then finally, we got down to the ocean and put up our trusty telescopes. We started seeing a dozen or more scoters and Red-breasted Mergansers and so many birds that are tied to the salt water. We were so excited to see our first Bufflehead, our first eiders, and our first Bright-throated Loons. I think we even had a Snowy Owl, which was very big for us. Plum Island was like another continent, a different ecosystem, the ocean and the sand and the salt marshes and things like that.


One of the benefits of my dad working for the railroad was that children in a railroad family got free passes for train trips. The large Boston area bird club called the Brookline Bird Club, which I would later become President of, had frequent weekend trips to places like Cape Ann and Newburyport. I would travel to Boston first and then take the stated train that would be met and riders would join those with vehicles for the day. It was getting to know other people, to be your friends and mentors in birding and a great group to just sort of learn stuff from people that knew more than you and knew the places, knew the calls, and it was a very cooperative thing, and it still continues today.


One interesting thing happened in the late 50s. A very, very rare owl came down to Concord, Massachusetts. One December morning I saw this bird fly by, and I didn't get a great look at it. I thought it might have been a Cooper's Hawk. A few days later it was identified as a Northern Hawk Owl. It's from Canada in the boreal forest, and every once in a while, one will come down this far but one had not been seen in Massachusetts for 50 years. So, the word got out. In those days, long before apps and ebird, we had something called the Voice of Audubon, which was a tape recording that changed every day or two about where birds were being seen. People dialed that recording and started calling each other.


The Northern Hawk Owl stayed for a month and showed no fear of humans. I'd sneak over whenever I could, especially on Saturdays and Sundays to help people see the owl acting, as an unofficial guide. I met this famous Ludlow Griscom who was taken there by Allen Morgan, head of Mass Audubon. Ludlow was unable to walk but we got him to see what was his last "Life bird". Another day when I went there, I ran into a gentleman who said he wanted to see the hawk owl. I took him around, showed him the hawk owl, and he asked me a bunch of questions. I said, “My name is Peter Alden”. The next thing I know, the front page of the local Boston paper had a picture of the hawk owl with my name mentioned. I didn't dare show up at school the next day, because someone was going to say, “You're a bird watcher!” They liked to pick on kids that were a little bit different and I fit the “bill”.


During my junior and senior years in high school, I did sneak off bird-watching whenever possible. I was on the football and basketball teams, so it wasn’t often that I could slip away.  One of the major excursions I did was to see puffins. A friend of mine and I ventured all the way up to Machias Seal Island in northeast Maine to see the puffins and the Arctic terns up there. The island is beyond Bar Harbor near the Brunswick border. At the time, it was the only Puffin colony before Steve Kress managed to work his magic by establishing new colonies on Eastern Egg Rock Island. There was only one way there which required you to go up to either Machiasport and get on a boat. It was fascinating to go out and get ashore on Machias Island, where you get into blinds that were located right near the burrows.


My mother was a librarian in Concord. Checking out the stacks I was drawn to a heavy book titled Arizona and its Bird Life. It featured fabulous color paintings by famous bird artists showing trogons, painted redstarts, Scott's Orioles and so many species of hummingbirds. It was like a far-away ecoplanet. I had seen most New England birds and dreamed of going to Arizona.


Before my sophomore year summer, I shoveled snow, mowed lawns, and weeded gardens to make some money. My father said he'd consider getting me free railroad passes to spend the summer in Texas and Arizona. My mother insisted that I contact local Audubon chapters in El Paso, Tucson, and Harlingen. She prayed that some member would put up a 16-year-old and take him birding. It all came through and away I went to the Mexican border!


While I felt great growing up in Concord with its long tradition of bird records, I was getting wanderlust, driven by seeing novel birds and places. When I started looking at college, I was more interested in geography than I was in being a zoologist. I wasn't a hands-on animal person. First, I thought I should apply here for a college in New England. I also applied to the University of Arizona in Tucson, a place that I had witnessed firsthand two summers earlier. When I got accepted early from the University of Arizona. With free railroad passes from my father’s job I could go out there and back freely. I made an easy decision. Arizona here I come.


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Stay tuned for updates on Peter's memoir. A Kickstarter campaign is coming to support publishing the book.

 
 
 

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