When Studies in the life history of the Song Sparrow by Margaret Morse Nice first appeared in print in 1937, it was 247 pages long. The ornithological world had never seen anything like it. Preliminary results of the years-long study had first been published in 1933 in the German Journal fur Ornithologie—no American publisher would accept such a lengthy manuscript. Mrs. Nice had met a young German ornithologist, Ernst Mayr, at the 1931 American Ornithologist Union meeting and had impressed him. Mayr, who at 27 had recently accepted a position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, opened doors to get her work published in Germany. It was the beginning of a collaboration that changed the direction of American ornithology. Mayr would later become a giant in the ornithological world and an architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Margaret Morse Nice was born in 1883 in Amherst, Massachusetts to an academic family. Her father was a professor of history at Amherst College; her mother had a degree in botany from Mount Holyoke. Her mother nurtured Margaret’s interest in birds. By age nine, Margaret was keeping notes on the birds she observed in their yard. At 12, she received a copy of Mabel Osgood Wright’s Bird Craft, a gift she called “the most cherished Christmas present of my life.”
Margaret graduated in 1906 from Mount Holyoke with coursework in biology. But she was disappointed: biology as taught at Mount Holyoke seemed a dead science, not one of the living world. Nonetheless, despite little familial support, she enrolled in a Master’s program At Clark University, where she was one of two women. She launched a thesis project on Bobwhite dietary habits, but within two years, married a fellow graduate student and became a trailing spouse when he took an academic teaching job in Oklahoma.
Five children followed in rapid succession. Fascinated by the development of language in her young children, Margaret studied the underlying patterns without formal training or professional guidance and took rigorous notes. She published her findings in 1927 in the Proceedings of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences. But birds remained her first love. During this time period, she also studied the birds of Oklahoma and published her report in 1931.
In 1927, Margaret became a trailing spouse yet again and followed her husband to Columbus, Ohio, where he took a job at Ohio State University. There she began her ground-breaking work on Song Sparrows, starting with observations of two banded pairs. Using leg bands to distinguish individual birds was cutting-edge science at the time. She eventually expanded her project to 69 banded pairs. She studied interactions, breeding, territoriality, learning, instinct, and song.
In an age when American ornithology focused on species range, subspecies distribution and building collections of study skins—all activities involving dead birds, Margaret’s research was startlingly novel. A reflection of her brilliant mind, it was all undertaken without the benefit of colleagues, an affiliated institution, or a laboratory. It was also entirely self-funded, as were most studies done by women at that time. But across the Atlantic, the Europeans were also interested in animal behavior and in 1938, trailing her husband yet again, Margaret would work under Konrad Lorenz for two months in his lab in Altenburg, Austria learning how to care for captive birds. She had a facility for foreign language, honed during her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke, and this helped her in studies abroad.
Her collaboration with Ernst Mayr continued as her children grew and left home. He and Margaret promoted the study of animal behavior, termed “ethology” in America. They arranged for Danish ornithologist Niko Tinbergen to visit the United States. Mayr coaxed Margaret into formally compiling her research into a two-volume book that ran over 500 pages. Then he sent it to Aldo Leopold at Wisconsin to review with an eye to run it in Science. Mayr orchestrated a campaign to make Margaret a Fellow in the AOU—the second woman to be recognized that way. Yet, recognition was slow in coming. In the first attempt at fellowship, the AOU membership voted to so honor a man who was chiefly a mammologist, rather than a woman who had conducted innovative research.
Fully leaning into its reputation as a fusty old boys’ network, the AOU rejected a bid to make Margaret Morse Nice the editor of its publication The Auk in 1942, despite her experience as an associate editor of the Wilson Bulletin. “We can hardly pick a woman editor for the Auk,” the AOU president wrote to another member. She was often dismissed because she had failed to complete a PhD—even though such AOU luminaries as Frank Chapman and T.S. Roberts lacked any formal ornithological training. More than once, Margaret was heard to exclaim, “I’m not a housewife, I’m a trained zoologist.” Yet, the AOU awarded her its coveted Brewster Medal that same year, the second woman to receive it.
Margaret Morse Nice continued her bird work into her later years, publishing in her late 70s a 200-page treatise on the behavioral development of precocial birds. It was one of dozens of papers and thousands of book reviews written in her lifetime. One should recall the triumph of one woman breaking through a man’s world whenever one hears the cheery voice of a small sparrow urging one to “put on your tea kettle-ettle-ettle.”
Information for this article, including the “housewife/trained zoologist” quote came from A Passion for Birds, by Mark V. Barrow, Jr. and from Wikipedia.
Recent Comments