Thornton W Burgess was born in 1874 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He was known as a conservationist and writer of children's books. Burgess loved the beauty of nature so much that during a fifty-year span he wrote 170 books and 15000 stories centered on nature and animals. Peter Rabbit and Jerry Muskrat are two of his most memorable characters. An excerpt reads, "Sometimes those terrible two-legged creatures would be hiding in the very middle of the wildest, most lonely looking marshes. They would be covered with grass so that we couldn't see them. Then, as we flew over them, would come the bang, bang, bang, bang of terrible guns, and always some of our flock would drop. We would have to leave them behind, for we knew if we wanted to live we must get beyond the reach of those terrible guns. So we would fly our hardest. It was awful, just simply awful!" Mrs. Quack paused and shuddered, and Peter Rabbit and Jerry Muskrat shuddered in sympathy."