Contributions To Ornithology
Nice worked on the life-histories of birds at a time when most of the focus was on collection, description and geographic listing. Her work on the Song Sparrow is considered a landmark and Deborah Strom wrote in Bird Watching with American Women (1986) that her work was so vast and difficult that the mind boggles at the time and patience required. Ernst Mayr wrote that Nice almost single-handedly initiated a new era in American ornithology and the only effective counter movement against the list-chasing movement. Her first research paper was published with the help of Mayr and Erwin Stresemann in the German Journal für Ornithologie in 1933 and 1934 because American journals would not accept such long articles.
Nice wrote nearly 250 papers on birds, 3,000 book reviews and several books including the Birds of Oklahoma (1924), The Watcher at the Nest (1939) and her autobiography. Her autobiography was published posthumously with a preface by Konrad Lorenz.
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