Olive Thorne Miller

Abstract

noted circle of popular bird writers from the east who found within her gates, amid her myriad birds and flowers, rare satisfaction and ministration for their declining years. Bradford Torrey, whose last days were spent in Santa Barbara, died on October 7, 1912, at the age of sixty-nine, leaving eleven bird books; and Mrs. Harriet Mann Miller, better known by her pen name of Olive Thorne Miller, whose last years were spent in Los Angeles, died on December 26, 1918, at the ripe age of eighty-seven, also leaving eleven bird books as her contribution to bird lore. Both were members of the American Ornithologists' Union, Mrs. Miller having joined in 1887 and been made a Member, as Mr. Torrey was, when the class of Members was established in 1901. To those familiar with the writings of these two there is still further parallelism, for in their books we find much the same leisurely literary quality, the charm of humor, and the pervading vital interest in the birds whose ways they are portraying. But while Mr. Torrey was well satisfied to accept the Rambler's Lease, and in his delightful discursive essays, such as those in Nature's Invitation and Field Days in California, man and bird figure with equal interest, Mrs. Miller's greatest happiness was to find the one bird she had perhaps traveled hundreds of miles to see, and hour after hour, day after day, and week after week, by patient, tireless study, note-book in hand, master the secret of that bird's home life. As she wrote, prefacing her chapters on the Kingbird's Nest and Three Little Kings, which represented nearly two months of field work, However familiar the bird, unless the student has watched its ways during the only domestic period of its life-nesting time-he has still something to learn. In fact he has almost everything to learn, for into those two weeks is crowded a whole life-time of emotions and experiences which fully bring out the individuality of the bird. . . . Moreover, to the devotee of the science that someone has aptly called Ornithography, nothing is so attractive. What hopes it holds out! Who can guess what mysteries shall be disclosed, what interesting episodes of life shall be seen around that charmed spot? For twenty years she spent from one to three months in the country watching birds, visiting various parts of New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan, Utah, Colorado, and Califor nia; accumulating the material which appeared in With the Birds in Maine, Upon the Tree Tops, True Bird Stories from My Note Books, In Nesting Time, Little Brothers of the Air, and A Bird Lover in the West. In New York and Utah I was with her and found that her one thought was to make an exhaustive study of birds unconscious of observation, a method which gave peculiar value to her work. To me, at that time, birds were companions from whom I wanted some response, but when I answered their calls and tried to get them to talk to me in her presence, I felt rebuked; she would never intrude upon them in that