Born: 8 August 1863, United States
Died: 22 September 1948
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Florence Augusta Merriam
American ornithologist, birdwatcher, and nature writer Florence Merriam Bailey published a series of field guides on North American bird life over the course of five decades, from 1890 to 1939. By writing for amateur birdwatchers, her books helped spur the popularity of birding as an activity.
Merriam herself had little formal education as a child, but loved exploring the Adirondack Mountains nearby. She was enrolled as a special student at Smith College in 1882, where her activism and nature writing began, but was not awarded a degree until she was 58. During her time there, she founded a chapter of the Audubon Society with Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, educating their classmates in ornithology and persuading them away from the fashion of feathered hats. By the time she left Smtih in 1886, a third of the students were involved in the Society.
In 1890, Merriam published her first book, Birds Through a Looking-Glass, a collection of bird profiles she had previously written for Audubon Magazine. Rather than conform to the typical approach of studying trapped birds indoors, Merriam advocated for studying them in their natural environments. From 1902 to 1919, she also wrote more than 50 articles for periodicals based on her own observations. At the request of the U.S. Biological Survey, she completed Birds of New Mexico in 1919 when the original author, Wells Cooke, died. In addition to her own writing and research, she significantly edited the work Cooke had done, and as such resisted when the Survey wanted to list them as co-authors, successfully arguing for sole authorship.
Merriam and her husband, mammalogist Vernon Orlando Bailey, lived in Washington, D.C., where she taught birdwatching classes at the National Zoological Park. In 1929, she became the first woman elected as a Fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and the first woman awarded the Brewster Medal in 1931. The mountain chickadee subspecies Parus gambeli baileyae is named in her honor.
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