High Arctic;: An expedition to the unspoiled north

by George Miksch Sutton

This is the personal record of an adventure across the icelands of the Canadian North by one of our most distinguished contemporary ornithologists and painters of birds, and an explorer extraordinaire. It is an exhilaratingly fresh account of a recent journey made by George Miksch Sutton to remote and uninhabited Bathurst Island, located northwest of Baffin Bay about half way between the Arctic Circle and the northernmost lands known to man. With a handful of colleagues he departed one late Spring as a member of an expedition sponsored by the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Ottawa to study behaviour, life history, and distribution of Arctic shorebirds. In this book Dr. Sutton describes his experiences and adventures - delightfully and informally. "You could put George Sutton, the bird artist, anywhere on the continent," wrote Roger Tory Peterson, "and he would know immediately what to look for." And what he soon found on Bathurst was a rare collection of bird and mammal as can be found anywhere in the musk-oxen, Peary's caribou, white wolves, lemming, snowy horned owls, purple sandpipers, long-tailed jaegers, rock ptarmigan, ivory gulls. Many of these he painted and eleven of them are depicted in full color in this book.

Genres: Birds

116 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

George Miksch Sutton (1898 - 1982) was an American ornithologist and bird artist. He published numerous technical papers in ornithology as well as more popular works illustrated with his own art. His early artistic work was inspired and tutored by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. In 1931, he was the first ornithologist to find the eggs of the Harris's Sparrow, one of the last North American birds to have its nest and eggs described. He did extensive field work in the Arctic (including Iceland), Oklahoma, Labrador, and Mexico. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and held academic posts at the University of Michigan and the University of Oklahoma, Norman.

Reviews

[Sandra Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely pictures!

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a special book for me. Dr. Sutton passed away years ago and I was fortunate enough to call him a friend. Dr. Sutton was not only a very special scholar, but also an entertaining, kind and gracious person. This book was special to me because I got to share some of the locations for bird watching in the arctic that are covered by the book. I visited Dr. Sutton several times at his home in Norman, Oklahoma and was fortunate enough to have him autograph a copy of this book in May of 1977. Dr. Sutton was well known for his field work and his writing, but is best known for his artwork, which is well displayed in this book.