Margaret Morse Nice (1883–1974)

Margaret Morse Nice was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, a daughter of Anson D. Morse, a professor of history at Amherst College, and his wife Margaret Duncan Ely. She spent her childhood on a small farmstead and learned to love nature, making frequent excursions into the countryside, developing and tending her own garden, and keeping many pets. She began writing as a child and published her first work, a small booklet on birds in fruit orchards, at age 12. In 1906, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College and, despite her parents' opposition to professions for women other than marriage, persuaded them to allow her further studies at Clark University. During this time, she met her future husband, Leonard Blaine Nice, also a graduate student. They married in 1909, and she followed him first to Harvard Medical School, then to the University of Oklahoma, where he taught physiology. Although she wanted to pursue a doctoral degree, she put her career on hold to support her husband's and to have children. As the mother of five daughters born between 1910 and 1923, she took an intense interest in child psychology, and published 18 articles on the topic between 1915 and 1933. Living in Oklahoma also helped rekindle her passion for the study of birds. She eventually completed her master’s degree in zoology from Clark with a thesis on the eating habits of the northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus). With her husband, she wrote The Birds of Oklahoma, first published in 1924. After her husband accepted a position at The Ohio State University in 1927, the family moved to Columbus. There Margaret produced her best-known work, the landmark two-volume Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow (1937 and 1943). These books earned her worldwide recognition, and she won the Brewster Medal from the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1942. In 1936, the family moved to Chicago, and between 1936 and 1974, Margaret produced dozens of scholarly journal articles on birds as well as thousands of reviews and several books, including The Watcher at the Nest (1939), The Role of Territory in Bird Life (1941), and Development of Behavior in Precocial Birds (1962). She was elected president of the Wilson Ornithological Society in 1938, the firs