How Florence Merriam Bailey Helped Shape Modern Birding—and Remains an Inspiration 140 Years Later

On a radiant September afternoon, I meet 20 fellow students at the boathouse stairs for one reason: to watch birds. We are Smith College’s Audubon on Campus chapter. But most people just call us the “Uncommon Tits,” a play on words that alludes not only to our frequent titmouse sightings, but also to the type of humor you’d expect at a historically women’s college. I look at my club co-president, Chloé Arciero; we had too many people to lead as one group. “Do you want to take them down the trail on the other side of the river? And I’ll stick to the pond?” Chloé nods and leads her crowd over the bridge and out of sight. 

When I began my freshman year at Smith in Northampton, Massachusetts, I couldn’t imagine I’d be confidently teaching others about our campus birds just a few years later. I’d always been interested in wildlife, but I was mostly enamored by whales and other marine creatures. But to cope with choosing a landlocked college, I signed up for a birding outing when I saw an Uncommon Tits table at the club fair. Quickly, I learned that when you stop calling every bird a “sparrow,” the biodiversity you discover is unparalleled. Nowadays birds run my life.

Ever since two Smith students, Wells Wells and Abigail Dustin, launched the Uncommon Tits in 2019, students like myself have flocked to the club to observe avifauna. Unknowingly, our group’s founders also rekindled a 140-year-old tradition of bird education on campus. In 1886, a student named Florence Merriam Bailey founded the original Smith College Audubon Society. It was the first environmental club on campus. It was also among the very first Audubon societies of the budding conservation movement.
 

I only learned about Bailey by chance. I was picking up some loaner binoculars for our club members at Smith’s Center for the Environment when a quick conversation with the center’s director intrigued me. She told me about the original Audubon campus chapter, which had long ago disbanded, and a little about Bailey, a bird conservation and education pioneer who was only getting started during her time at Smith.

Curious, I bought Bailey’s first book, Birds Through an Opera Glass, published in 1889 a few years after she graduated. The book was the first bird guide in the United States to acquaint the general public with the relatively novel idea of live bird observation as a recreational activity. It profiles 70 birds, many local to Smith and the surrounding area in western Massachusetts. In it, she writes of friends excitedly leading her to an unusual Bobolink visitor, observing Eastern Bluebirds nesting by the college road, and tracking the fall arrival of White-throated Sparrows. I was immediately captivated by her close observations and humor.

Bailey’s dedication to creating accessible birding resources for the general public—an idea embraced by countless birding groups today—was well ahead of its time back then. Yet despite her remarkable legacy, the rising ornithologists and birders at her own alma mater barely know her. Neither do plenty of birders or conservationists. I set out to learn more about the woman behind birdwatching.

Bailey was born into a prominent upstate New York family in 1863 and raised in a small town on the edge of the Adirondacks, where her mother Caroline’s lessons about the natural world shaped her and her brother’s lifelong passions. While her brother, Clinton Hart Merriam, spent time trapping mammals and would become an influential zoologist, Bailey spent her time walking in the woods observing birds.

When she arrived at Smith in 1882, her pastime transformed into a call for activism. The feathered corpses she found on many of her classmates’ heads deeply disturbed her. Hats decorated with bird plumage were in fashion at the time, selling for high prices at market. By 1886, the millinery trade was responsible for the deaths of an estimated five million birds a year, which contributed to rapidly declining avian populations. But along with the popularity of feathered hats, bird protection efforts also began to trend.

In 1886, George Bird Grinnell, a friend of Bailey’s brother, founded the first Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds, a predecessor of today’s national organization, and urged others to form Audubon chapters and campaign against the plumage trade. Soon, Bailey and her friend Fannie Hardy took up the cause by forming the Smith College Audubon Society—one of the first of its kind. 

Bailey’s goals did not lie narrowly on ending feathered fashion, though. Instead of demonizing women who wore feathers, she focused on inspiring their admiration for birdlife. In an article published in Grinnell’s Audubon Magazine in 1887, she wrote that if her Audubon chapter only targeted the millinery trade “the society would come to an end as soon as the birds were temporarily protected by a change of fashion. No. People must know and love the birds, or false logic and worldly argument will make them indifferent to their destruction." Rather than shooting birds to show them off to friends, a popular pastime, Bailey engaged the public through local bird walks, which was a novel way to introduce people to wildlife at the time. Her chapter gained the membership of a full third of the student body at Smith—I bet they also had to split up to go birding—and the group’s conservation endeavors yielded tangible results within the year. The local milliner reportedly received so many hats for retrimming that the proprietor reached out to the school, concerned that feathers had been banned.

After she left Smith, Bailey’s college experiences continued to inform her lifelong efforts to inspire protection and appreciation for American birds. At age 26, writing under her maiden name Florence Augusta Merriam (and later under her married name Bailey), she published Birds Through an Opera Glass. Before this guide, books chronicling birdlife were generally written for scientists and the educated upper class. They were expensive and used language inaccessible to the average reader. Bailey, instead, taught anyone how to watch birds in a small, affordable, and conversational volume. In her introduction, she assures her readers that “this little book is no real lion, and that they have nothing to fear. It is not an ornithological [treatise]… but is a very gentle beast, and of a good conscience.” The book received high praise from the public and ornithologists alike, with glowing reviews in a half dozen journals and newspapers.

Her ornithology and writing career took off from there. Struggling with her health (possibly  tuberculosis), she began to travel intermittently to seek cleaner air in the West and wrote several books inspired by the people and wildlife she encountered, such as A-Birding on a Bronco and My Summer in a Mormon Village. Over time, she became an authority on Western birds, publishing field guides and articles in ornithology journals. Birders used her Handbook of Birds of the Western United States, a companion to Frank M. Chapman’s Birds of Eastern North America, for decades.

Although her avian studies focused on the West, her teaching and activism in the East were as impressive. After moving to Washington D.C in the 1890s, she co-founded the Audubon Society of District of Columbia in 1897, taught ornithology classes at the National Zoological Park, and generally advocated on behalf of birds in the nation’s capital. She was one among a number of pioneering women, including Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall, at the forefront of the Audubon movement. Soon this movement's efforts bore fruit: In 1900, Congress passed the Lacey Act, the first federal wildlife protection law in the United States.

The law made it a federal crime to transport or sell illegally harvested animals across state lines, making it much harder to trade in bird plumes. Years of activism also began to make a dent on fashion trends, as women soured on the feathers in their caps. Finally in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act became law, spelling the end of the millinery industry’s avian obsession. The decades-long conservation campaign led by women had done its job. And just as Bailey had hoped, the movement they had sparked did not end there.

By the time Bailey died in 1948, she had achieved a level of recognition in ornithology that few if any women had to that date. She was the first woman appointed a fellow in the American Ornithologists’ Union and the first to receive the Brewster medal —a prestigious award for exceptional contributions to ornithology. Yet despite her achievements, the Auk did not write her a memorial until seven years after her passing, and the New York Times only published her obituary in 2019. 

And while she is not a household name today (even among birders), Bailey’s legacy at Smith remains alive and well. Since I started at college in 2022, interest in birds on campus has grown, our chapter’s educational events fill lecture rooms, and one instructor even started an introductory biology section dedicated to ornithology. Hoping to engage our broader campus community, our chapter recently used an Audubon in Action grant to install interpretive signage about local birds at Macleish Field Station. Along with other Audubon chapters around the country, we’ve also written to Congress to support the Local Communities & Bird Habitat Stewardship Act of 2025, a bill that would fund local conservation. Going forward, we hope to offer our members even more opportunities to volunteer and have an impact.

With such an extensive network of bird lovers on campus, I’m optimistic about the future of the chapter. But I also know that conservationists today face many complex challenges—as do birds themselves. While the feather trade is no longer an issue as it was in Bailey's days, habitat loss and degradation, climate change, and other human influences are causing major changes for bird populations. Many species are declining, while some are adapting, moving to new ground, or changing their migration patterns. (Even a book as lighthearted as Birds through an Opera Glass shows us these shifts. For example, the bluebirds she saw nesting near the road in May are also no longer harbingers of spring, but familiar year-round faces.)

These are the threats I will have to directly grapple with as I graduate from Smith in May and enter a career in conservation. My goal is to go to graduate school to study how animals behave and adapt in the face of environmental disturbances, but first I plan to seek experience as a field technician. Generally, this job involves long days outdoors collecting ecological data for research—an activity that Bailey, who kept remarkably detailed field records, might appreciate.  Although field research can be demanding, low-paid, and unstable, there is no better way for an early-career biologist to observe birds in their natural environment. Similar to Bailey, I have the flexibility and financial stability to make this choice. While women do not face the same levels of discrimination they did in Bailey’s time, privilege is still prevalent in conservation sciences. There is a long way to go before there is a level playing field of opportunities to participate in research.

As I move forward, I hope to cultivate my own observations to share with the world and spark the same curiosity that Bailey instilled in so many. Her belief that people must first know and appreciate birds before they feel motivated to protect them continues to guide my approach. Successful conservation initiatives involve a real relationship between people and their environment, and Bailey was a master at developing that. When I graduate in May, I may leave the Uncommon Tits behind, but I will forever be indebted to the path that Bailey set out for women in this field.