Martha Conger Neblett "Connie" Hagar

Based in Rockport from 1935 to 1973, Connie Hagar was a musician, hotelier and self-taught naturalist whose decades of daily journals transformed the scientific understanding of bird migration and established Rockport as a world-class birding destination. She is credited with recording 500 bird species in the Aransas Bay area (204 on one Big Day in 1953), including 20 to 25 species new to the Texas avifauna list, and birds later believed to be extinct, such as the Eskimo curlew. Her witness to hummingbird migrations helped validate a new view of their seasonal coastal movements. She was also noted as a tireless educator, hosting visiting ornithologists (including such notables as Robert Porter Allen, Edgar Kincaid, Roger Tory Petersen, Alexander Sprunt, among many others), and speaking to children and garden clubs about the natural world. The creation of preserves at the Connie Hagar Wildlife Sanctuary and the Connie Hagar Cottage Sanctuary is a surviving legacy of her life.