Florence Merriam Bailey. Photo courtesy of the Lewis County Historical Society.
Beginning as an undergraduate at Smith College in 1886, where she co-founded a chapter of the original Audubon Society, and later as a founding member of the Washington D.C. chapter of the rekindled National Audubon Society, she led birding trips, wrote extensively for Bird-Lore (later Audubon) Magazine, The Condor, and other publications, and authored a number of influential field guides and travelogues recounting her travels in the western United States. Notable published works include: Birds through an Opera Glass (1889); A-birding on a Bronco (1896); and Birds of Village and Field: a Bird Book for Beginners (1898), all published under her maiden name, Florence A. Merriam. Under her married name, Florence Merriam Bailey, she published: Handbook of Birds of the Western United States, including the Great Plains, Great Basin, Pacific Slope, and Lower Rio Grande Valley (1902); and the seminal Birds of New Mexico (1928).
Nominated by her brother, C. Hart Merriam, she became the first woman Associate Member of the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1885, its first woman Fellow in 1929, and the first woman recipient of the AOU’s Brewster Medal in 1931 for an exceptional written work on birds of the Western Hemisphere, awarded for her book Birds of New Mexico.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/obituaries/florence-merriam-bailey-overlooked.html
Para información sobre Florence Merriam Bailey en español: https://mujeresconciencia.com/2017/03/14/las-alas-florence-merriam-bailey-naturalista-ambientalista-amante-los-pajaros/
Compiled by WFVZ staff from cited sources and the FMB biography No Woman Tenderfoot by Harriet Kofalk (Texas A&M University Press, 1989).
