Nearly 40 years ago, I became one of the few reporters invited onto the grounds of the famed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson's beautiful estate called The Cedars off Neck Road in Old Lyme. As his assistant explained to me at the time, Peterson enjoyed his privacy but apparently was convinced by his wife, Virginia, to allow the local paper a chance to view the artist and bird expert in his native habitat — an on-site meeting only occasionally afforded to national media.

So, it came as a bit of fate that Virginia's daughter, Linda Marie Westervelt, happened to reach out to me by email to pitch a story on her new self-published book, "Where Bluebirds Fly," which paints a portrait of the 20-year relationship between Peterson and her mother, now both deceased. She had no idea I had met either one of them, let alone both, on a snowy day in January 1981 not long after they had returned from a two-month trip to Antarctica.

"It's colder here than it was in Antarctica," Roger told me as he gave a tour of the Old Lyme property where he and Virginia, his third wife, made a home.

The tour included a chance to chat with Peterson in his windowed artist's studio, where birds flitted in and out of feeders.

As Westervelt recalled, Peterson's estate consisted of 70 acres of land, four houses and a staff of five. But by the time her mom married Roger, Westervelt was in her late 20s and returned home only on occasion, mostly for holidays and grand events such as Roger's birthday.

"They were a good team." Westervelt said in a phone interview from her home in Florida on Dec. 15. "She was a great help to his career."

Virginia was responsible for creating all the maps in Peterson's updated "A Field Guide to the Birds" series that he started publishing in the 1930s. Peterson was a man long obsessed with birds who died in his sleep at age 87 not long after completing the final plate for one of his updates, which regularly sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Not since Audubon had anyone exerted such influence on backyard birders and serious scientists alike. Westervelt estimated that Peterson's guides have sold more than 10 million copies, and they are still selling.

By the time I met him, Peterson was at the top of his game, spending an average of 12 hours a day working on the lifelike bird paintings that were his hallmark, using a library of bird skins and his photographs to get the details just right.

"I scarcely have time to read my mail," he told me.

It was a heady time for the then 72-year-old, as his latest birding field guide had ascended to the Top 10 on the New York Times Bestseller List in both the hardcover and softcover categories, the first time in history this feat had been accomplished. The first printing of his book had sold out quickly to the tune of 350,000 copies, and another 100,000 were on the way to bookstores.

Throughout Westervelt's 176-page memoir filled with photographs, she sprinkles in observations from her mother's journals. Virginia died five years after Roger, at age 75, of cancer.

"Roger's drive, sustained with equally matched energy, is something extraordinary to behold when we are in the field," Virginia wrote. "He is constantly moving, seeing, accessing, and of course, photographing."

Westervelt also notes a period when Roger seemed to have hit a mental roadblock as he was working on the fifth edition of the Peterson "Eastern Field Guide" in the late 1970s. Virginia, as her daughter recalled, planted a butterfly garden to try to cheer him up.

"Roger loved to watch the insects he called 'flying flowers,'" she writes. "Mom's garden was a success, and Roger's creative juices and those of the butterflies flowed."

Virginia and Roger first met socially in Old Lyme when they were married to other people, and Westervelt still remembers the neighborhood clambakes they'd be invited to on Poverty Island, a land mass in Long Island Sound that has since been washed away. When their marriages broke apart, according to Westervelt's telling, they found their love for each other while out on the Connecticut River photographing birds.

Roger often joked about himself as “the hermit who lives in the woods,” but Virginia would try to push him into at least a few social engagements.

"Getting Roger to local social events was never easy," Westervelt says in the book. "He said they interfered with his work. Many times, Mother suggested they attend the church in Old Lyme where they were married (First Congregational), but Roger usually declined. Mom believed he didn’t like the attention directed his way at the end of the service."

But being famous had its advantages, too, which Westervelt recounts in a section devoted to many of her stepfather's encounters with royalty and famous people. He earned many honorary degrees along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was bestowed on him in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. Other winners that year: playwright Tennessee Williams, writers Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren and opera singer Beverly Sills.

Then there were the encounters with less pomp, such as the time Roger and Virginia were tenting in Africa when they heard loud roars and snorts outside, perhaps from a lion or a leopard.

"Mother could feel an animal’s breath through the canvas ... (luckily) she had placed a pan and spoon under her cot to scare animals away (guns were not her thing). Slowly she pulled them out and banged the (bleep) out of them, and the creature took off."

Another funny episode recounted in the book occurred in Florida, when Roger spoke briefly with a woman who was using his field guide to identify a bird:

“It’s a Snowy Egret,” the woman said to her companion.

“No, it’s a Great Egret,” said Roger.

“No, it’s not. It’s a Snowy Egret,” insisted the woman. “It says so right here in my Peterson guide.”

“Lady,” replied Roger, “I wrote that book.”

“Sure, you did,” said the lady. “And I’m John James Audubon.”

Westervelt also tells about her mom's disappointment when she found out Peterson had sold his "Snowy Owls" painting to a collector. It was something she had secretly wanted as a wedding present, a fact she finally revealed a year later when she discussed with Roger the possibility of buying it back.

"In the end, Mom didn’t have to buy it back — Roger painted her another one," she wrote.

Peterson's paintings were realistic and detailed, but hardly experimental. And, according to his stepdaughter, that's the way he liked it. When the subject of modern art came up, she recalled him saying, "Art rhymes with fart." He was equally dismissive of famed modern artists, jokingly ascribing their fame to media hype.

Peterson was most often associated with the penguins he consorted with during no less than 18 trips to Antarctica. In fact, he went by the nickname King Penguin, his favorite bird, and late in life the Mystic Aquarium named its penguin exhibit after him.

Virginia in 1996 commissioned famed artist Kent Ullberg to sculpt a bronze King Penguin statue dedicated to Roger, but Roger died before its black-tie unveiling. Later, his ashes were scattered on Great Island in Old Lyme, where Roger's favorite Connecticut bird, the osprey, are known to flourish, and where in 1961 he had erected the first osprey nesting platform on the island to help them recover from the ravages of chemical spraying; the area is now known as the Dr. Roger Tory Peterson Wildlife Area.

"In the 20 years of our marriage much of our time was spent checking the osprey platforms (on the island) for nesting birds," Virginia wrote in her journal. "It was fitting that on this gorgeous sunlit day with the birds flying overhead I spread Roger’s ashes ... Roger is now a part of Great Island — forever with the birds here."

l.howard@theday.com

BOOK DETAILS

WHAT: "Where Bluebirds Fly: Inside the World of Roger Tory Peterson and Virginia Marie Peterson"

AUTHOR: Linda Marie Westervelt

PAGES: 167

PRICE: $16.99, softcover

AVAILABLE: Amazon.com