Close to Home

I’ve been reading in Women in the Field: America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists about nineteenth- and twentieth-century female ornithologists. Although many of them traveled afield, what caught my eye was that many of them stayed close to home and made their most important contributions to science by observing “ordinary” birds such as the Northern Flicker and the Black-capped Chickadee. Cordelia Stanwood (1865-1958) conducted her studies on the forty acres of habitat surrounding her home. Rich and varied, the land included appealing microcosms ranging from fields and wetlands to forest, used by a wide variety of birds that provided Stanwood with a lifetime of nature study. Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974) studied the Song Sparrow. Althea Rosina Sherman (1854-1943) spent years focusing on the Northern Flickers she watched from her Iowa dooryard before she took a trip around the world. Studies on local flora and fauna may arguably have been more characteristic of female naturalists with their circumscribed range of travel, but male naturalists also studied the pedestrian and the local. The most famous naturalist of all, Charles Darwin, ran most of his study about earthworms (the book apparently sold better than On the Origin of Species during his lifetime) from his country estate. It’s comforting to know that someday even if I cannot go afield, I can always study the Black-capped Chickadees from my window.