Florence Merriam Bailey

In the early 1900s, Florence and her husband, Vernon Bailey (Chief Field Naturalist for the U.S. Biological Survey), conducted extensive field work in the state. She contributed to the resulting Biological Survey of Texas (1905), with special documentation of sky island birds in the Chisos and Guadalupe Mountains. She gave particular attention to nesting habits, songs, and social behaviors of Texas species, as opposed to her spouse’s work on specimen and data collection. She is also remembered for her book, Birds through an Opera Glass (1889) one of the earliest bird guides, a volume that also pressed for controls on the millinery trade, and argued for bird study without killing specimens. In addition, she wrote The Handbook of Birds of the Western United States (1902), which provides a key early baseline of populations as they currently shift under habitat loss and climate change.