Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey (August 8, 1863September 22, 1948) was an American ornithologist, birdwatcher, and nature writer. Between 1890 and 1939, she published a series of field guides on North American bird life. These guides were often written with amateur birdwatchers in mind, leading to the popularity of the birding movement.
With little formal education as a child, Merriam developed an interest in the natural sciences from her explorations of the Adirondack Mountains, near where she grew up, and the scientific interests of her family members, including her older brother Clinton Hart Merriam. Her nature writing and activism started at Smith College in 1882, where she was enrolled as a special student. She was later awarded a degree at age 58, due to her subsequent activism and writing. While there, she and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm created a chapter of the Audubon Society to educate their classmates on ornithology and dissuade them from wearing hats with feathers. By the time Merriam left Smith in 1886, one-third of the student body was involved in the Society.
In 1889, Merriam turned a series of bird profiles that she had published in Bird-Lore into a book, Birds Through an Opera-Glass. Unlike other ornithological works, which studied trapped birds in indoor settings, Merriam's writing encouraged the natural, outdoor study of live birds. Her later works, such as Birds of Village and Field, were more technical than her early writings, but they retained their focus on ecology. In 1899, Merriam married Vernon Orlando Bailey, a member of the U.S. Biological Survey. Between 1902 and 1919, she wrote over 50 articles for periodicals like The Condor based on her observations. Her magnum opus was Birds of New Mexico, which she completed at the request of the U.S. Biological Survey after Wells Cooke's death. Originally, she and Cooke were listed as co-authors, but Merriam successfully petitioned the Survey to name her the sole author due to the magnitude of her contributions.
Merriam and her husband lived in Washington, D.C., where she taught birdwatching classes at the National Zoological Park. She was both the first woman elected as a Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union and the first woman awarded the Brewster Medal. After her husband's death in 1942, Merriam mostly retreated from public life until her death at age 85. Parus gambeli baileyae, a subspecies of mountain chickadee, is named in her honor.
Early life and education
Florence Augusta Merriam was born on August 8, 1863, in Locust Grove, New York, the youngest of four children born to Clinton Levi and Caroline (née Hart) Merriam. Her father had been a merchant and banker in Utica and New York City before settling in Locust Grove, shortly before his daughter was born. Between 1871 and 1875, Clinton Merriam served as the United States Congressman from Lewis County, New York, as a member of the Republican Party. Caroline Merriam, meanwhile, was a graduate of Rutgers Female College and the daughter of Levi Hart, a county court judge and New York State Assembly member from Collinsville.
Many members of the Merriam family took an interest in the natural sciences. While at Rutgers, Caroline had developed an interest in astronomy, which she shared with her husband and children by allowing them to look at constellations and eclipses through a telescope. Merriam once referred to her paternal aunt, Helen Bagg, as "our family botanist". Her father, meanwhile, developed an interest in nature when, in 1870, he traveled to California on the first transcontinental railroad. Clinton was interested in glaciation as it related to his travels in the Yosemite Valley, and he engaged in a lengthy written correspondence with the naturalist John Muir over this topic.
The Merriam family estate, named Homewood, was situated near the Adirondack Mountains, with ample opportunities to explore local wildlife. Merriam would take walks around the estate with her father and older brother, developing her knowledge of the region's species. Her primary interest was in birds, whose habits, songs, and species she learned to identify by watching them from her dining room window. When she was nine years old, Merriam accompanied her father and her older brother, Clinton Hart Merriam, on their camping trip to Florida. C. Hart, as he was known in his adult life, was also interested in the natural sciences, spending his adolescence studying birds and performing taxidermy on the animals he trapped on the family property. Their father's time in Congress gave them connections to the naturalist scene in Washington, D.C.: the elder Merriam arranged a meeting with Spencer Fullerton Baird, then the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to employ C. Hart as an ornithologist on a Yellowstone expedition in 1872.
As a child, Merriam was primarily educated at home, which she described as based in the scientific and natural interests of her family members. Her first formal education took place in Syracuse, New York, where Merriam was sent for medical treatment due to general ill health. She lived with her physician's family for a year and attended the local public school there. After that experience, Merriam attended school in New York City, where her family spent the winters, and at Mrs. Piatt's private school in Utica.
College and early activism
At the insistence of her older brothers, Merriam enrolled in 1882 at the newly-founded Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The poor health that had beleaguered her throughout her childhood and prevented her from much formal education meant that she could only enroll as a special student. This prevented her from the advanced study of liberal arts, but also allowed her to take courses in which she was personally interested rather than following a prescribed course of study. At the time of her enrollment, Smith lacked a science course, and so most of her class work was in writing, literature, geology, ethics, comparative religions, philosophy, music, and art. By the end of her college tenure, however, she had concentrated in science and wrote a senior thesis on evolution.
By September 1885, as she entered her final year at Smith, Merriam had an obsession with birds that began at the encouragement of family friend Ernest Thompson Seton. C. Hart, who at that time had become the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey and one of the founders of the American Ornithologists' Union, nominated her as the first female associate of the Union. The following January, Merriam, who had befriended Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, was aghast to find that her friend wore bird feathers in her hat. As more of their classmates took up the practice, Merriam began advocating both on and off campus for the protection of birds and alterations to the millinery industry. In 1886, Merriam published a series of newspaper articles in New York, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., arguing for an end to bird feather hat decorations.
On February 11, 1886, the naturalist George Bird Grinnell wrote an editorial proposing the formation of an Audubon Society for the protection of wild birds. One month after Grinnell made this call, Merriam and Hardy, who by this point had stopped wearing feathered hats, created one of the first local chapters of the Audubon Society at Smith College. About 75 students and faculty members attended the first meeting of the organization, and by March 17, 1886, the Smith College Audubon Society had adopted a constitution, officers, and a field committee. That year, Merriam published an article in Audubon Magazine about the aims of the club, which encouraged field study by asking students to observe "how the birds look, what they have to say, how they spend their time, what sort of houses they build, and what are their family secrets".
Merriam was of the belief that rather than outright telling her classmates to stop wearing feathered hats, it was more effective to take them on nature walks, which would cause them to form an attachment to local wildlife and stop the practice of their own accord. As part of this process, she recruited John Burroughs to come to campus and take the students on a nature walk. Shortly after Burroughs's May 1886 visit, one-third of the student population at Smith had denounced the use of fashionable bird feathers and had joined the local Audubon Society. Burroughs, meanwhile, returned to campus every year to lead a bird walk, even after Merriam had left Smith.
When Merriam left Smith in June 1886, the Audubon Society had become popular, while her classmates continued to communicate through class letters with major life updates. As a special student, Merriam did not earn a degree after her four years of college, but the institution eventually presented her with a bachelor's degree in 1921, when she was 58 years old. Merriam's movement to protect birds from the millinery industry progressed after she left Smith: the Lacey Act of 1900 prohibited the trade of illegally acquired wildlife, while the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made the protection of migratory birds a federal law.
Nature writing and activism
Early writing and travels After leaving Smith in 1886, Merriam, still unmarried, was caught between her desires to advance her nature writing and to contribute to the world socially. Her first articles on bird lore in Audubon Magazine appeared in 1887, and when she was not writing, Merriam joined her mother's volunteer work at social action clubs for working women and girls. In 1891, she spent one month in Chicago at a summer school for working girls founded as a branch of Jane Addams's Hull House, teaching a class on birds. The following summer, she worked in New York City at one of Grace Hoadley Dodge's social clubs.
Both Merriam and her mother suffered from poor health, possibly caused by tuberculosis, which led the family to take vacations in regions with climates that were thought to ease illness, such as the West Coast, Lake Placid, New York City, and Florida. In 1889, Merriam and her family traveled to San Diego County, at the homestead of her uncle Gustavus, in the hopes of improving the health of Merriam and her mother. In addition to easing her illness, the months-long stay in Southern California gave Merriam an interest in the Western United States and the avian life found there. During this time, Audubon Magazine had ceased publication, and Merriam decided to collect the fifty common birds whose profiles she had written for the magazine and collect them into a book. Birds Through an Opera-Glass, published in 1890 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston, was a collection of her Audubon profiles and 20 additional birds, also including appendices to help observers classify birds and additional reference materials for those who wished to continue their study.
Birds Through an Opera-Glass and Merriam's other work deviated from the ornithological studies of her contemporaries: rather than examining the bodies of trapped or killed birds in indoor settings, Merriam believed in observing wildlife outdoors in their natural environments, frequently through a pair of binoculars. The profiles in Birds Through an Opera-Glass ranged from half a page to five or six pages long and contained physical descriptions of the birds' appearance, song, nests, and habits, often accompanied by illustrations or musical notation. Author Scott Weidensaul has referred to Birds Through an Opera-Glass as "in a sense, the first field guide to American birds". While scientific ornithology was a male-dominated field, birdwatching had become more popular among women, as it allowed for amateur study.