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written by Gazette Publisher Tom Thomson
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MAY 2008

The Song Sparrow Lady

Timing is everything, they say, in love and war and just about anything else. So it was, as things turned out, that the timing was all wrong for me to have met Margaret Morse Nice. But it was close. Well, fairly close. Maybe off by a year or two.

I became mesmerized by birds one April afternoon when I was 15 years old and in the ninth grade of what we used to call junior high school. This was approximately two or three years after Mrs. Nice completed her monumental study on the behavior of song sparrows. As I have mentioned before, my family lived in a house facing the south side of The Ohio State University campus. Mrs. Nice lived half a dozen blocks north of the campus.

The year of my great bird bedazzlement, I started working after school at the first Big Bear supermarket in Columbus, which was located in a building that had housed an old skating rink across from the Ohio Stadium and was probably within earshot of a sparrow’s song emanating from Mrs. Nice’s property.

This was in the days before self-service. I was a clerk in the produce department, and on Friday and Saturday nights the customers were three- and four-deep in front of the counter. There were over a dozen clerks, high school kids and college students bagging and weighing fruit and vegetables and scrawling the prices on the sacks with black marking crayons for 25 cents an hour.

Picture it. There I was, the boy idealist, dreaming of birds morning, noon, and night, perhaps picking out oranges and grapefruits for the woman who would become world famous for her life-history studies of the song sparrow. Maybe touching hands and never knowing of our mutual love. Passing like ships in the night. What irony. What agony. But, alas. I don’t believe it ever happened. If I am not mistaken, Mrs. Nice and her husband moved to Chicago about 1939.

But from 1940 to 1942, I frequently birded my way home from North High School along the west bank of the Olentangy River, which is directly opposite the principal parts of Interpont, her song sparrow study area. Sometimes I even hiked along her side of the river, walking across dikes and along brushy fishermen’s trails within a stone’s throw of where she had lived, probably looking at some of the very same song sparrows she had made famous.

Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz, with whom Mrs. Nice studied in Austria during the summer of 1938, wrote, “Her paper on the song sparrow was, to the best of my knowledge, the first longterm field investigation of the life of any free-living wild animal.” Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow was originally published in Germany’s Journal for Ornithology and subsequently she received international acclaim. In 1937 and 1943, the complete work was published in two volumes by the Linnaean Society of New York. Dover editions of the books are still in print.

Volume I of her work deals with vital statistics: weights, territories, migrations, percentiles of nesting success, and the survival of individuals. Volume II concentrates on behavior, including daily activities, dominance, songs, call notes, mating, defense of young, and many other traits and characteristics.

Mrs. Nice’s work represents a pioneering effort of the first magnitude in advancing the importance of comparative behavior studies. She wrote that “each male song sparrow is a unique personality. When he dies his songs are lost forever.” She trapped and banded her subjects – initially two pairs and later 69 – and kept copious notes. She spent eight years studying them. Her goal was to learn everything possible about their daily lives.

In the words of Frank Graham Jr., writing in Audubon magazine, Nice had dragged her more “legitimate” colleagues out of the listing stage and into modern ethnological studies. As a result, during her lifetime, honors flooded in on her.

Mrs. Nice received a bit of assistance and advice from Lawrence E. Hicks and Edward S. Thomas, two central Ohio naturalists.

In later life, I would occasionally drive by her home just to see where it was and to relish the old youthful dreams. Thank you, Mrs. Nice, you added a lot to my youthful pursuit of birds.

A version of this column appeared in the Short North Gazette in February 1999.

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