Ornithological Passions of American Poet Celia Thaxter

American poet Celia Leighton Thaxter (1835 – 1894) was shaped by both environmental beauty and destruction she witnessed in her New England community. As a woman who spent much of her life on a small wind-swept island, she was educated by seasons and migrations that later informed her work. A brief education among Boston’s literary elite launched her creative career, where she focused on her local ecology. At that time, over-hunting and newly fashionable plumed hats and accessories had created a serious possibility of avian decimation. By creating awareness of humans’ culpability for birds’ endangerment, Thaxter’s work evoked public sympathy and contributed to social and political change. This essay applies ecofeminist and cultural analyses to Thaxter’s work written as part of the 19th century bird defense movement, by examining the emotional rhetoric employed and activism implied in her poems and prose about birds, specifically: “The Kittiwakes,” “The Wounded Curlew,” and “The Great Blue Heron: A Warning.” Little attention has been paid to Thaxter’s didactic poems which use birds as subjects to instruct children and adults about the fragility of birdlife and to warn of humans’ destructive behaviors. These works illustrate Thaxter’s ecological sensibility and her use of emotion and reason to communicate an ecological message. Her poetry and prose about birdlife fortified the budding Audubon Society and contributed to the birth of the environmental movement. We can learn from such poetic activism, from attention to nature turned commodity, and the dangers of depleting finite resources. In our global environmental crisis, we recognize the interwoven relationships between birds and humans. Perhaps poems can help stymie our current ecological trajectory.

A herpetological survey of Edith L. Moore Nature Sanctuary

Urban herpetology deals with the interaction of amphibians and reptiles with each other and their environment in an urban setting. As such, well-preserved natural areas within urban environments can be important tools for conservation. Edith L. Moore Nature Sanctuary is an 18-acre wooded sanctuary located west of downtown Houston, Texas and is the headquarters to Houston Audubon Society. This study compared iNaturalist data with results from visual encounter surveys and aquatic funnel traps. Results from these two sources showed 24 species belonging to 12 families and 17 genera of herpetofauna inhabit the property. However, several species common in surrounding areas were absent. Combination of data from community science and traditional survey methods allowed us to better highlight herpetofauna present in the park besides also identifying species that may be of management concern for Edith L. Moore. 

My Bird Problem

This chapter describes the author's experience while birding in South Texas. There is no better American place for birds in February than South Texas. In three days, the author had seen fetchingly disheveled anis flopping around on top of shrubs, Jurassic-looking anhingas sun-drying their wings, squadrons of white pelicans gliding downriver on nine-foot wingspans, a couple of caracaras eating a road-killed king snake, an elegant trogon and a crimson-collared grosbeak, and two exotic robins all lurking on a postage-stamp Audubon Society tract in Weslaco. The only frustration was the author's number one trip target bird, the black-bellied whistling-duck. A tree nester, strangely long-legged, with a candy-pink bill and a bold white eye ring, the whistling-duck was one of those birds in the field guide which the author could not quite believe existed.

The Black and White

This chapter recounts how the author found a dead black-and-white warbler many years ago. It details the author's first visit to a taxidermy studio. Even though the idea of having the warbler mounted and displayed on the author's mantle was irresistible, they knew it was also illegal. In 1918, Congress passed the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or the MBTA. The MBTA saved hundreds of species from the destruction, and sometimes extinction, brought on by the effects of commercial bird trade. It essentially bans any human contact with migratory birds. One may not kill, capture, or pursue them; one may not collect their eggs or nests or even their feathers; and one may not pick them up if they are dead. Taxidermists know all this, and so — with the exception of the permitted, but regulated game birds from hunting — they will not get near a migratory bird. The author then joined a team of local Audubon Society volunteers in order to get a salvage permit, which lets people temporarily possess a migratory bird.

Journalism as an Advocacy Tool: Negotiating Boundaries of Professionalism in the 20th-Century American Environmental Movement

Environmental nongovernmental organizations faced unprecedented opportunities after public interest in environmental issues exploded in the 1960s. Drawing on the official archives of the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and the National Audubon Society, this study demonstrates how these organizations redeveloped their publications to take advantage of newfound public interest and political opportunities in the 1960s through the 1980s. The organizations adopted professional journalistic norms and practices in their publications to court mass appeal and gain political legitimacy, but their journalistic endeavors were hampered by internal disagreements over the use of journalism as an advocacy tool.

The changing trend in songbirds’ abundance, variety and physical condition in Connecticut’s forestry habitat

Songbirds are facing rapid population declines in Connecticut due to habitat loss. Man-made habitats such as powerline corridors are one of the few remaining ideal habitats for songbirds in the state. This study aims to determine if the abundance and variety of song-birds in four selected forests (i.e. Naugatuck State Forest, Sharon Audubon Society, Miles Wildlife Sanctuary, and Great Mountain Forest Species Variety) in Connecticut show patterns of decline from 2005 to 2014. This study also compares the physical condition of songbirds captured along a powerline corridor in the Naugatuck State Forest with those captured in the rest three non-fragmented forests in Northwestern Connecticut using Mann-Whitney U tests. Weight and wingspan are used as indicators of bird physical condition. The results demonstrate that the three non-fragmented forests experienced a steady decline in the variety of songbirds between 2005 and 2014. In addition, songbirds’ abundance decreased steadily during the same period, except that of the ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla) and wood thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) in Miles Wildlife Sanctuary. The results from the Mann-Whitney U test have shown that after sex- and age-controlled features, the physical conditions of the three selective songbirds – veery (Catharus fuscescens), ovenbird, and wood thrush – tend to be better in the Naugatuck State Forest than in the three non-fragmented forests – Sharon Audubon Society, Miles Wildlife Sanctuary, and Great Mountain Forest Species Variety. Given are recommendations on how to protect the shrubland habitat along powerline corridors and how to create the shrubland habitat in non-fragmented forests.

Whaling in the New Northwest

Don goldsberry had been speaking for only a few minutes at the Game Commission’s April 1972 hearing, and already Elizabeth Stanton Lay couldn’t believe her ears. Branding killer whales with dry ice? Burning their skin with lasers? Confining them to pools for research and profit? What kind of men were these? After listening to representatives from the Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Washington Environment Council voice their opposition, the sixty-year-old Lay rose to speak. “I have never before heard such a frank statement of what seems to me a totally inhumane attitude toward living creatures,” she declared. Marine mammals could do without the type of “research” Namu Inc. proposed. Whales were disappearing around the world, she reminded listeners, and the same could happen to orcas in Puget Sound. “When I was a very little girl, we used to see blackfish out in the bay, and we loved it,” she recalled. Now locals rarely saw the great creatures, except when men like Goldsberry trapped them behind nets. Lay was never one to stand idly by. Named after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, she would have made her namesake proud. Born in Tacoma in 1911, she had grown up in the nearby town of Rosedale on Henderson Bay and earned a history degree from Reed College in Portland, followed by a master’s degree in political science from the University of Washington. She studied in Geneva, worked as a journalist in Washington, DC, and served in the new Federal Security Agency during World War II. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she worked as a historian for the US military, living in Paris, Frankfurt, and Seoul and producing a two-volume account of the Berlin Airlift. By the time of the Game Commission hearing, Lay had retired to Rosedale, where she played the organ at her Christian Science church, promoted forest preservation, and fought to stop orca capture. Her interest in the issue may have started with young Ken Gormly’s 1968 account of the catch in Vaughn Bay.