Margaret Morse Nice - Later Life

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.