My Way to Ornithology

Pettingill's route to a distinguished career was agonizingly slow; this memoir ends with his 1936 appointment, at age 30, to Carleton College in Minnesota. He grew up in Maine and Massachusetts where his physician father was director of TB sanitaria. His interests in birds began in childhood and never waned. Pettingill gives a minutely detailed account of his schooling at Bowdoin College (dances, fraternity activities, acting) and gradute work at Cornell, where he roomed with artist George Miksch Sutton. He relates how he learned to photograph birds and his first attempts at giving illustrated lectures, his lengthy courtship of high school sweetheart Eleanor and the early years of their marriage. Pettingill's reports on field trips to Churchill at Hudson Bay and Grand Manon Island are the brightest spots in an otherwise pedestrian memoir. Illustrated. (Apr.)