Later Life
At Clark University, Margaret met Leonard Blaine Nice and they married in 1908. The family moved to Norman, Oklahoma where Leonard had accepted a faculty position at the University. They had five children, Constance, born 1911, Marjorie, 1912, Barbara, 1916, Eleanor, 1918, and Janet, born 1922. Eleanor died of pneumonia at age nine in Columbus, Ohio.
From 1913 to 1927 she studied the birds of Oklahoma which were published as the "Birds of Oklahoma" in 1931. During the time in Oklahoma, she also became very interested in child psychology on which she published 18 articles. She studied her own children, their vocabulary, sentence length and speech development. In 1927 she moved to Columbus, Ohio, where Blaine had accepted a professorship at the Ohio State University. Here she carried out the study of sparrows that established her as one of the leading ornithologists in the world, recording the behavior of individual birds over a long period of time. She studied two banded pairs of birds initially and later 69 banded pairs. Beginning in 1929, she spent eight years studying these birds and focused on interactions, breeding, territoriality, learning, instinct and song. In 1931 she met Ernst Mayr at a meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU), and he encouraged her to write and arranged the publishing the results of her studies. Following the publication Nice was elected the first woman president of the Wilson Club and to fellowship of the AOU. In 1938 she spent two months studying the habits of captive birds with Konrad Lorenz in Austria.
Margaret Morse Nice died in Chicago on June 26, 1974 from arteriosclerosis, two months after the death of her husband.
Read more about this topic: Margaret Morse Nice
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)