Florence Merriam Bailey

Florence Merriam Bailey, 1904

Alas, the first Naturalist's Week has come to an end. I hope you had an enjoyable time learning about some of the people who helped to discover, innovate, and conserve the animals that we normally learn about on this site. I tried to pick some individuals who may be a bit lesser known and it was fun to go back to my roots (part of my background is in European History, so writing about people, places, and their impact is right up my alley). Anyway, I might do this again, since there are so many awesome people out there who significantly impacted the animal world for the better!

But for now, let's learn about Florence Merriam Bailey, a woman who had an intense interest in the feathered creatures of the world, and who dedicated more than 50 years of her life to their study and observation.

Born in New York in 1863, Florence Merriam came from a family that strongly encouraged her interest in natural history. Her father was a friend of John Muir, and her older brother would eventually become the first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. In fact,  I could probably write an entire article about her brother, Clinton Hart Merriam, but we'll save his adventures for another day!

Anyway, from 1882-1886 she studied at Smith College, and though she did not received a degree (well... she would get an honorary one in 1921) she did begin to be more consumed by her passion for birds. At that time, birds were studied from their skins and bones, and rarely from life. Interestingly, Florence Merriam was one of the very first people to call for the use of Binoculars when birding, rather than a gun! 

Color identification illustration from
Birds of Village and Field

In 1885, while still at Smith, she started to write about protecting birds, especially in regards to the fashion industry. Feathers were incredibly popular on womens hats at the time, and as a result some species were being hunted to near extinction (the Whooping Crane!) Merriam formed her school's Audubon Club, wrote in defense of the birds, and actually organized protests and distributed pamphlets to make the cause known. 

It was around this time that she also became the first female associate member of the American Ornithologist's Union, and four years later she published her first book, Birds Through an Opera Glass, which was based on articles that she had written for Audubon Magazine. During the late 1880s and through the 1890s, Florence Merriam traveled throughout the American West, which influenced several more books.  

At the tail-end of the century she returned to Washington D.C. to stay with her brother, and it is there that she met and married one of his naturalist colleagues, Vernon Bailey. The couple continued to travel throughout the West, writing about their animal collections and observations- she with birds, and he with mammals.

Florence Merriam Bailey continued to write and explore until her death in 1948 at the age of 85. She published a dozen books, more than 100 articles, and helped to bring awareness to birds of the United States. Her last major work, Among the Birds in the Grand Canyon National Park, was published in 1939, and in her later years she helped to found the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia, where she taught classes on Ornithology for several years. She became the first woman fellow of the American Ornithologist's Union in 1929, and even had a subspecies of Mountain Chicadee, Parus gambeli baileyae, named after her in 1908.

If you are interested in her works, several of them are available through public domain resources like Archive.org.

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Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold

Today's Naturalist is a little more contemporary, at least when compared to those people who have been featured previously. His name is Aldo Leopold, and he is best known for his contributions to Ecology, Environmental Science, and Conservation. He also wrote the influential Environmental book, The Sand County Almanac.

Rand Aldo Leopold was born in Iowa in 1887, and he spent a great deal of his childhood outdoors. He did a great deal of hiking, climbing, and hunting, and would spend hours observing, drawing, and writing about the nature around him. It was then only natural that he attended the Yale Forest School, which he graduated from in 1909.

After completing his education, Leopold entered the United States Forest Service in New Mexico and Arizona. In 1922 he created the Forest Service's very first fish and game handbook, and established Gila National Forest as the first designated Wilderness Area in 1924.

It was during his time in the Southwest that Leopold developed many of his ideas regarding preservation and wildlife management. A popular mindset of the time was to keep animals on private preserves for the sole purpose of having something to hunt for sport. Leopold saw things differently. He felt that wilderness areas should exist to maintain healthy, biologically diverse natural communities.

In 1924 Leopold transferred to Madison, Wisconsin, where he continued his work in Ecology and Conservation Philosophy. He published Game Management in 1933, which outlined the techniques needed to manage and restore wildlife areas. Shortly after that book was published, Leopold was offered the chair of an all new department at the University of Wisconsin - the Department of Game Management.

It was around this time that Leopold and his family purchased a run-down track of land near Baraboo, Wisconsin. This 80 acre plot had been damaged by overgrazing, logging, and wildfires, and was far from fertile and healthy. It was at this location that Leopold put many of his ideas into practice, attempting to restore the wilderness around him and documenting all the changes. His work and observations here inspired his most famous work, The Sand County Almanac.

Unfortunately, Leopold never saw the success of his greatest piece of nature writing. Only a week after he got the publisher's acceptance, he died of a heart attack at the age of 61 while helping to fight a wildfire on a neighbor's property. The book would be released a year later, in 1949, and would go on to sell over 2 million copies. It is considered one of the most significant environmental works ever written.

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Mary Anning

Portrait of Mary Anning, c. 1842

So far all of our Naturalists have dealt with the living animals that they saw during their studies and travels. Today we'll mix that up a bit and learn all about a woman who made some pretty awesome contributions to Paleontology... some of which she did when she was only twelve years old!

Mary Anning was born in Dorset, England in 1799. Her parents had ten children, but only Mary and her brother Joseph lived to adulthood (Mary herself was actually named after an older sister of hers that died before she was born). From a young age Mary's father would take her and Joseph on fossil hunting trips to the nearby cliffs. They had the great luck to live near the Blue Lias, a geological formation in the cliffs that dated back to the Jurassic Period.

Anning's father died in 1810, leaving his family with next to nothing. Mary and Joseph continued to hunt for fossils, so that they could sell them for profit and support their family. Fossil hunting on these cliffs was dangerous work! Landslides were common during the winter, but that was the best season to search as those landslides exposed new fossils, so the risk had to be taken. That risk paid off for the first time in 1811, when Mary was only twelve. Her and Joseph discovered a 4ft long Ichthyosaur skull, which was the very first of it's kind to be uncovered! (Mary would later go back for the rest of the skeleton, which would be one of several complete skeletons she would find in her lifetime.)

Mary, Joseph, and their mother all contributed to the Fossil collecting business that brought income to their family, but Mary was the driving force, especially once Joseph entered into an apprenticeship that took up most of his time.

She continued to hunt for fossils over the next 30 odd years, making several significant finds, including the worlds very first Plesiosaur, the first Pterosaur outside of Germany, several fish, and numerous invertebrates.  She was even one of the first people to consider that Coprolites might be fossilized dung! Anning's finds helped to bolster support for the idea of extinction, was we a relatively new idea of the time, and several of her finds are now displayed in prominent museums

Illustration of the first found Ichthyosaur skull

Unfortunately, despite her fossil-finding skills and all the contributions that she made, Mary Anning and her family were often given very little credit. She had made many friends within the scientific community, and had collaborated with anatomists and biologists, but at the end of the day she was often not given any recognition for her finds, and there were those who thought she was a fraud, as they did not belive a woman could do such work.

That is not to say that she wasn't respected, however. She had those aforementioned collaborations, was given an annuity from the Geological Society of London, and was named the first Honorary Member of the Dorset County Museum. After her death from breast cancer in 1847, she received an obituary from the Geological Society, which is notable as they didn't not even admit women members until 1904.

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Georg Steller

If you are a frequent reader of Animal a Day, you'll recognize today's featured naturalist. That is because, in the past, we've featured several of the different animals species that were named after him! Hmm... just doing a quick search we have:

• Steller's Eider
• Steller's Sea Cow
• Steller's Sea Eagle
• Steller's Sea Lion

So if those animal names didn't give it away already, Georg Wilhelm Steller was a naturalist and explorer who that did his work while on Ocean Expeditions.

No images of Steller exist. So let's look at a drawing
he did of Sea Otters!

Steller was born near Nuremburg Germany in 1709, and was later educated at the University of Wittenburg. Though he was German by birth, he moved to Russia in 1734, and it is with Russian expeditions that he did his major studies.

After finding work at Saint Petersburg's Academy of Sciences, Steller joined Vitus Bering's expedition to the ocean east of Siberia in 1740. Bering himself may also sound familiar- the strait between Russia and Alaska bears his name! 

In July 1741 the expedition arrived in Alaska, and Steller became the first non-native to set foot upon Alaskan soil. Bering wanted only to stop and refill water, so he gave the naturalist only 10 hours to explore, but during that time he discovered a bird known as Steller's Jay (pretty much the only Steller's animal we haven't talked about here yet, go figure). He deduced that the bird was a close relative to the Blue Jay, which suggested that Alaska and the rest of North America were joined together.

On the way back to Russia the expedition was shipwrecked on a piece of land that would eventually be named Bering Island. Bering himself died on this island, along with several members of the crew who succumbed to Scurvy. The remaining crew hunted the local fauna, and worked on rebuilding a ship that would take them home. Among the animals consumed were the Steller's Sea Cows, massive relatives to the Manatees that were up to 30ft long. Steller discovered several other species during that year on the island, including his namesake Sea Lion, Eider, and a cryptid only he claims to have observed called the Steller's Sea Ape.

The expedition eventually made it off Bering Island, though only 46 of the original 78 remained. After arriving back in Russia, Georg Steller spent the next few years traveling throughout Siberia, collecting plants and animals and writing extensive journals. Unfortunately, his life was cut short. In 1746, on a trip from Siberia back to St. Petersburg, he contracted a fever and died at the age of 37. Though he never published a single paper in his lifetime, his journals did make it to Saint Petersburg where they were used by other scientists and explorers.

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Maria Sibylla Merian

Portrait c. 1700

Today's featured person is one you may have never heard of- 17th century German illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian. She is known for the numerous paintings and engravings that she did of plants and insects, as well as the accurate observations that she made while creating these images.

Merian was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1647. She came from a family that was already very established in the art world. Her father, Matthaus Merian, was a prominent engraver and publisher, and her stepfather was still like painter Jacob Marrel. Marrel taught his stepdaughter to draw and paint from a very young age, and she studied under him along with his male pupils.

Insects fascinated Merian, and by the age of 13 she was already producing works of art based on specimens that she had captured and observed. At 18 she married one of her stepfather's pupils, and soon moved to Nuremburg. While there she began to take on students of her own, and her increased wealth and social standing gave her access to the gardens of the city elite. These garden studies would influence her first two published collections - Neues Blumenbuch (New Book of Flowers), and Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food).

Engraving from The Insects of Suriname

And since I've just mentioned Caterpillars, now would be a great time to talk about Maria's major contribution to science. During her time, scholars believed that insects spontaneously generated out of mud and decaying matter. Maria Merian helped to turn that school of thought on its head. Her interest in insects led her to create incredibly detailed portraits of them in various stages of metamorphoses. She not only showed the different stages, she also included the plants that the insects ate, and provided detailed textual notes on the timing, colors, and forms. So overall, that close attention to detail helped to disprove the beliefs of the time.

In 1681 her stepfather passed away and she returned to Frankfurt to handle his estate. The ensuing legal battle eventually ended with her leaving her husband and moving to the Netherlands with her mother and two daughters, Johanna and Dorothea. After the death of Merian's mother in 1691, the family moved to the city of Amsterdam where their artwork received a great deal of notice from the local scientific community. During this time Johanna married a prominent merchant who was involved with trade to Suriname, which was a newly acquired Dutch colony.

Feeling that she had seen all the plants and insects she would ever see in the Netherlands, Maria wanted to see the exotic flora and fauna that Suriname had to offer. In 1699, she and Dorothea set sail for South America, and spent two years there before poor health and the threat of Malaria sent them back to Europe.

Upon their return, the mother and daughter started work on a new book, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphoses of the Insects of Suriname), which was published in 1705. During her time in Suriname, Merian not only discovered several previously unknown species, but she also classified them as well. Some of these classifications have remained today!

Maria Sibylla Merian died in 1717. Around the time of her death, several of her watercolors were sold to Czar Peter the Great, and the following year Dorothea moved to Saint Petersburg were she continued her life as an artist.

Maria Sibylla Merian's art continues to be collected, and her memory has been recognized in the past few decades though stamps, portraits on money, and through the naming of a German research vessel in 2005.

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Pliny the Elder

Let's kick off this theme week by going really, really old school. Our first naturalist is noted Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. And by Rome, I don't just mean the city, I mean the Empire! Pliny lived nearly 2,000 years ago!

A 17th century depiction.
No images from his lifetime survive.

Gaius Plinius Secondus was born around 23AD in Como Italy and had quite the interesting life. His father was a member of the Equestrian class, which meant young Pliny was able to be educated, and he spent his late childhood and teenage years in Rome. Around 45AD he entered the army, and traveled to what are now the Low Countries and Germany. His time in Germany inspired his first literary work, a short treatise on how to throw spears from horseback (a military technique that he observed there). He also later wrote a 20 volume work titled History of the Germanic Wars.

At the age of 36 Pliny returned to Rome, but the political situation was not exactly favorable towards serious historians and writers, so Pliny's social status and career did not take off as one would expect. That would all change, thanks to some serious government turmoil. Nero was Emperor and his tyrannical ways led to revolts and civil war, and once the dust settled it was the father of one of Pliny's friends, Vespasian, who became the new Emperor. From there Pliny's career skyrocketed, and he was given procuratorships that took him all over the Roman Empire, including Spain and Africa. These travels would all strongly influence his studies in natural history, and would inspire and influence his most famous work, Naturalis Historia.

Naturalis Historia is one of the largest Roman works to have survived into modern times, and at 37 volumes large is almost an understatement. The purpose of the work was for it to be a giant encyclopedia of knowledge, ranging from math, to art, to science. Pliny used his own experiences and collected knowledge to create the book, which was the last thing he wrote, and he also cited literally thousands of other writings to make it incredibly comprehensive. Meteorology, medicine, gemstones, plants, geography, and anthropology are all featured in the work.

Because this is Famous Naturalists week, and because animals are our real focus here, chapters VIII-XI are what interest us the most. These deal with land animals, marine animals, birds, and insects respectively. Pliny writes about all sorts of animals, but some of what he says needs to be taken with a very, very large grain of salt.

Elephants, for example, bury their lost tusks, point lost travelers in the right direction, and are able to walk up a tight-rope backward. He gives them several other human-like traits as well, describing them as merciful and sensible animals. Oh, and Crocodiles? Venomous! Dragons? Yeah, they're real.

4th Centry Mosaic of an Elephant and Tiger

Of course, there is factual information in there as well, and great deals of it at that! Pliny describes animals that weren't often seen by everyday Romans (except maybe in arena spectacles). Tigers, Camels (both Bactrian and Dromedary), and Rhinoceroses are all written about, along with domesticated creatures and even the more common beasts like Squirrels and Mice. He even describes Whales, including Sperm Whales and Orcas- referring to them by, what else, their Latin names. They are, however, called "monstrous fishes."

Overall what I find interesting about this book is the fact that it shows 2,000 year old perceptions about animals. Which creatures were considered important? Exotic? Reviled? It also shows what kind of knowledge was out there at the time- like Whales being fish, or Dragons being real. Really fascinating stuff!

There is so much to be said about Pliny the Elder, and while I'm sure I could easily write a post five times this size, I simply do not have the time! ...Though I should at least mention that he died during the Mount Vesuvious eruption in 79AD, attempting to evacuate people.

His works, as well as the works of his nephew, Pliny the Younger (who references his uncle frequently), are widely available for reading both online and in printed form (though you'll need a big bookshelf!) If you're interested in some 2,000 year old Zoology, or are fascinated by Rome in general, give their works a read!

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