The ‘Nice’ lady who studied song sparrows

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
In the modern era it has been unusual for amateurs to make contributions to the sciences, but there are examples. Percival Lowell, a businessman and scion of the famous Boston Brahmin family, made some questionable conclusions based on his observations of Mars and Venus, but he made a sound contribution when he noticed aberrant movements of Uranus and Neptune that suggested the existence of a “planet X” beyond them. Pluto was discovered in 1930, shortly after Lowell’s death, at the Lowell Observatory.

Geology began in the 19th Century as a field dominated by “gentlemen of means,” most overwhelmingly in England and Scotland. Sir Charles Lyell, a Scottish baronet, was a lawyer by profession, but abandoned the law for a career in geology. His “Principles of Geology” was the standard text for decades; Charles Darwin, another amateur scientist, brought it along on his four-year voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle.

While astronomy required an investment in expensive equipment and geology tended to require a great deal of travel, ornithology has much less overhead. Birdwatching has constituted an amateur arm of the scientific study of birds since its inception in the late 18th Century with the publication of “Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne” by the parson/naturalist Gilbert White.

Any reader of Patrick O’Brian’s novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin will be struck by the latter’s obsession with birds, which he is constantly watching through a telescope and collecting with a shotgun. The O’Brian books are set during the Napoleonic Wars in the first decades of the 19th Century. John James Audubon, who was entirely self-taught in both art and science, began publishing his “Birds of America” after 1827. He too collected his specimens with a shotgun and stuffed them, which is why his paintings often show birds in such unnatural positions.

The term “bird watching” first appears (as two words) as the title of a 1901 book by Edmund Selous, another British gentleman and lawyer who decided to pursue a career in science. The “watching” became a growing part of the study of birds as binoculars became lighter and their optics better. In the late 19th century opera glasses were used, but the designs improved rapidly from the 1890s into the early 20th century, paving the way for an explosion of interest after 1934 when Roger Tory Peterson, a trained artist, but an amateur naturalist, published his first “Field Guide to Birds.”

Margaret Morse was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1883, the daughter of a history professor at Amherst College and a mother educated at Mount Holyoke Seminary (later College). Morse went to her mother’s alma mater and then on the Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, from which she received a master’s degree in biology in 1915, one of only two women to do so. She had already met and married her husband, Leonard Blaine Nice, in 1908, and she actually received her graduate degree while they were living in Norman, Oklahoma, where Blaine was a professor of physiology and pharmacology.

By 1915 she had already had two of her five children, and she had already begun the work that would become “The Birds of Oklahoma,” published in 1931 and written in collaboration with her husband. But by the time that book was published they had already moved to Columbus, Ohio, where Blaine had accepted a position at the Ohio State University. It was here that Margaret Morse Nice did research for which she is famous.

Beginning in 1929, Nice spent eight years studying song sparrows on her family’s 60-acre property, Interpont, near the Olentangy River. She eventually banded 69 pairs and studied their habits closely. She engaged in this “life-history” study approach at a time when professional ornithology consisted primarily of establishing which birds lived where and how they might related.

In a 2016 post at the blog Cool Green Science, Joe Smith quoted the opening lines of Nice’s “The Watcher at the Nest” (1939): “The land was defended and won by age-old ceremonies and fierce battle …. Their conflicts with each other and their neighbors, their luck with their wives and devotion to their babies … the fortunes of their sons and daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren—all these were watched season in and season out until tragedy overtook them.”

Smith joked that a reader could be forgiven for believing this passage was from George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones.” It does showcase the style of an Edwardian naturalist that Nice mixed in with her rigorous science. Smith notes that Nice’s key innovation, still in widespread use today, is the longitudinal study, in which the lives of individual animals are documented in great detail over a period of years.

Her research was vital to moving the field forward because in the early 20th Century much of the information about birds was either missing or inaccurate. Smith recounts how Nice discovered the published incubation periods of many birds were inaccurate. In tracking down why this was so, she discovered the “data” was not from observation, but ultimately from speculations by Aristotle. Yes, that Aristotle.

Nice had studied chickens as a child, and the banding of poultry was commonplace, but she was among the first to band wild birds in order to be able to identify individual sparrows. She used combinations of colored celluloid that she repurposed from children’s toys bought at a dime store, a suggestion she took from a scientific article on chickadee banding.

Margaret Morse Nice published 250 scientific articles and seven book-length works, including “Studies in the Life-history of the Song Sparrow” (1941). Nobel Prize-winning scientist Konrad Lorenz called her song sparrow book “the finest piece of life history work ever done,” and that she “almost single-handedly initiated a new era in American ornithology.”

Bill Chaisson, who has been a birdwatcher since age 11, is a former editor of the Eagle Times. He now works for the Town of Wilmot and lives in Sutton.