The Eye Of The Wind
The Eye Of The Wind
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THE EYE OF THE WIND is the autobiography of a great naturalist, sportsman, nature artist, and adventurer.
Peter Scott's father, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, became a national hero when he died tragically in the antarctic in 1912, leaving his young son a legacy of fame and honor. Peter Scott grew up amongst distinguished people and memorable events. Once, at the age of four, he created consternation on the lawns of Buckingham Palace by insisting that Queen Alexandra play "trains" with him. The playwright James Barrie was his beloved godfather. Axel Munthe invited him to San Michele. Among the other famous men of the time who came to his family's house were Lord Asquith, George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, and Lord Baden-Powell.
Peter Scott was at first a hunter. On cold mornings of winter he would go down to the marshes, where the geese gathered in their thousands, to stalk them from the bottom of a silent punt, a cannon mounted on the bow. When he shot a noble tag, silhouetted on the mountainside, his excitement was mixed with remorse.
Later at Cambridge, as a zoology student, Scott could not work up much enthusiasm for dissecting voles, much preferring to study living animals---his pet ferret and bats. The discovery that he could actually sell his under-graduate paintings led him to the serious study of art. It is in fact as a painter of birds that he is best known in this country. In time Scott came to prefer stalking deer with a camera to shooting them, and learned how to capture geese alive with a rocket-propelled net. In 1946 at Slimbridge, in the West of England, he created the Wildfowl Trust, a unique reservation where ducks, geese, and swans have been assembled, joined in winter by hundreds of wildfowl. Each year 150,000 people come to see them.
