born on December 6, 1883 in Amherst, Massachusetts/ United States
died on June 26, 1974 in Chicago/ United States
US-American ornithologist
50th anniversary of death on June 26, 2024
Biography
Margaret Morse was the middle of seven children, with boys and girls always alternating exactly, as she explained in her memoir Research is a Passion With Me (1970). Both parents were academics; her father taught history at Amherst College. Even as children, Margaret and her favorite brother Harold were keenly interested in nature, and found the diverse native bird life especially captivating. Harold died when Margaret was 13 years old:
This bereavement threw me on my own resources, and I turned to birds with a passion that was not to be matched for many years.
Margaret attended Mount Holyoke College; after graduating, she spent two years as a research assistant at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she met and married Leonard Blaine Nice. His career as a physician dictated their subsequent moves and places of residence: the family moved from Cambridge to Norman in Oklahoma, where Blaine became head of physiology in 1913; to Columbus in 1927, where he took up a position at Ohio State University; to Chicago in 1936, where he worked at the University of Chicago.
Margaret gave birth to four daughters between 1910 and 1918. The “passionate naturalist” sometimes agonized over the never-ending, mindless housework:
“Even though our meals were simple, the washing and ironing always sent out, and though I averaged an hour a day on research … my life became so cluttered with mere things that my free spirit was smothered. … I decided it would be better to be a bird. Birds are very busy at one period each year caring for babies, but this lasts only a few weeks with many of them, and then their babies are grown and gone. Best of all, they leave their houses forever and take to camping for the rest of the year. No wonder they are happy.”
In the 1920s, the family bought a car, and Margaret Nice solved the problem by getting the whole family involved in ornithological fieldwork. She wrote the first of more than 250 research papers, and upon publication her work received immediate recognition from the experts.
In Ohio, the family bought a house on the Olentangy River; the surrounding marshland was home to countless bird species. Here, Nice began tagging individual birds and tracking their life cycles and soon became an authority on bird behavior. She documented the territoriality of small birds, as well as their courtship, mating and dominance behaviors. The resulting two-volume work, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow, established her as the leading ornithologist in the United States.
Nice was very gifted with languages; she translated the most important research work of her European colleagues into English and maintained a lively correspondence with them.
In 1938 she was appointed president of the Wilson Ornithological Society, making her the first woman to head a major American ornithological society.
(Text from 1997; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
Quotes
I felt pity for everyone who couldn't go camping to study the birds of Oklahoma. And then I remembered that, strange as this may sound, hardly anyone but us even felt the desire to do so.
My army pants were my pride and joy; I was amazed at the ease with which I could jump from rock to rock. It was around this time that women in America began wearing men's clothing on outdoor excursions.
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