125th Anniversary Archives

From the archives: “Something must be done besides saying, ‘Don’t wear feathers and don’t shoot birds.’ ”

March 30, 2023 — You can almost feel the fatigue, as if by June they were meeting just for the sake of meeting.

In fact, during the first half of 1898 the executive committee of the fledgling Audubon Society of the State of Connecticut had met a lot — every week since mid January, when they formally decided that they would form an Audubon Society. 

They had expanded the committee, recruited town “secretaries” from throughout the state, mailed government circulars provided by the local congressman, increased membership, and held an annual meeting at the Fairfield Town Hall. But maybe that wasn’t enough.

Just four days after that Annual Meeting, Mabel Osgood Wright, the president, called the executive committee together. The members gathered in the usual place — the home of Helen Glover, a short walk down Fairfield’s Main Street from the Town Green.

In general, the hand-written minutes of the early meetings are filled with routine records of motions made, seconded, passed, or tabled. Rarely is there a hint of emotion. But in the June 8 minutes, you can feel Wright’s determination to do something:

“Mrs. Wright said the time had come, she thought, for carrying out the practical side of the work — something besides recruitment is to be considered — something must be done besides saying, ‘Don’t wear feathers and don’t shoot birds.’ ”

Connecticut Audubon held its first children’s education program on June 17, 1898, in Washington Hall, which was on the second floor of the Pequot School in Southport. The building, on Main Street, still stands and is now the Southport School. Photo courtesy of the Pequot Library Association.

She moved that the education committee appropriate $100 to “procure” three sets of lantern slides — “Mrs. Wright to furnish literary material to accompany the same.”

The idea was that anyone in Connecticut who was interested in birds could request the slides, at no cost except for shipping.

Procuring the slides themselves though was not an insignificant expense — $100 in 1898 is the equivalent of $3,600 today — or effort for the executive committee. The slides would take time to arrive. Business had to be conducted by the U.S. Mail, letters had to be hand written by the corresponding secretary and, judging by the minutes, everything the committee did, it did through a motion — seconded and approved —at a meeting, including decisions on which supplies they needed exactly, whom to send the slides to, and what rules to promulgate for their use. (See the footnotes for more on the lantern slides and their costs.)

So maybe because they knew the process would take time, they also decided at that June 8 meeting to go directly to the younger generation.

“Mrs. Wm. Glover made a motion that Mrs. Wright should give a talk on Birds to children in the district schools on June 17th. … The entertainment is to be one hour in length — Mrs. Wright to have an original paper and Mrs. Wheeler commissioned to look up one or two short stories. Mrs. Wright made a motion that the teachers of the district schools be notified, and that they invite the children.”

To this day, educating the public about bird conservation is a foundation of the Connecticut Audubon Society’s work. Our Science in Nature program reaches about 20,000 students a year.  And while we no longer have local secretaries, our seven centers and EcoTravel program provide enjoyable birding experiences to thousands of adults, while also teaching about conservation.

It can be said that the official impetus came that day, June 8, 1898, when Wright told the executive committee that something must be done besides saying, “Don’t wear feathers and don’t shoot birds.”

The children’s meeting was set for June 17th, in Washington Hall, on the second floor of the Pequot School, Main Street, Southport. Minutes from a later meeting summarized:

“Over a hundred & fifty were present from Southport, Fairfield, Mill Plain and Greenfield Hill. Mrs Wright held the attention of the children for an hour. Mrs. Wheeler, Mrs. Buckley and Mrs. Wm. Glover also read.”

It took six months and a lot of meetings to get there. But Connecticut Audubon’s first 150 young students learned about birds, and conservation education was now officially a part of the organization’s work.

(Footnotes: For a contemporary account of the lantern slides, this PDF is a photocopy of a section of Bird Lore, from Connecticut Audubon’s archives. A precursor of Audubon magazine, Bird Lore featured among other things reports from the start-up Audubon societies around the country. Mabel Osgood Wright edited that section; the account in the PDF is a report of the first year of Connecticut Audubon’s activities, written by Harriet Glover, who with Wright and others was among the founders of Connecticut Audubon.

(In November 1898, the executive committee was still discussing the costs. This PDF is of the hand-written minutes from the November 11, 1898, meeting. The total turned out to be $128.75, and as you’ll see every detail was scrutinized.)

Mabel Osgood Wright: A lifelong commitment to birds

Mabel Osgood Wright in an undated photo.

March 8, 2023 — To help mark the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Connecticut Audubon Society, we’re re-publishing a short account of Mabel Osgood Wright’s life and achievements, written by a subsequent leader of the organization, Kathleen Van Der Aue, now chair emerita.

Wright (1859-1934) was among a group of women who founded Connecticut Audubon in January 1898. A prolific author and an important conservationist on the national scene, she went on the serve as president of Connecticut Audubon until 1924.

Mabel Osgood Wright: A lifelong commitment to birds

by Kathleen Van Der Aue
Chair Emerita, Connecticut Audubon Society Board of Directors

It’s impossible to understand the Connecticut Audubon Society and its first sanctuary, Birdcraft, without knowing something of its founder, Mabel Osgood Wright, and her great contributions to ornithology and conservation.

She had aspired to become a physician but respected her father’s advice: “If young women wish to be lawyers, preachers, physicians or merchants we would put no harsher obstacle before them than our honest opinion that such is not their providential career.” Or, in her own words: “I intended to go to Cornell to study medicine, but I married instead.” She married but turned her passion toward the conservation of birds, a lifelong commitment. In her first book, The Friendship of Nature: A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers (1894) she described the local Fairfield, Connecticut, area flora and fauna in a series of essays which she enhanced with her own photographs. At the time people worshipped the grandeur of nature but Wright’s book was written to connect people intimately with the wonders of the environment in their own backyards. The book was reviewed favorably in The Auk (Scientific Journal of the American Ornithologists Union) and a number of other publications including the New York Times.

Wright’s scientific knowledge of birds came through her friendship with Joel Allen, curator of the Museum of Natural History and Frank Chapman, his assistant. She studied with them in 1894-95 and in 1895 she published her second book, Birdcraft, which gave bird identification information for each bird, its song and habitat along with her personal observations of their behavioral characteristics. This inexpensive book filled a void for American birders and was praised by the likes of John Burroughs. It was reprinted nine times and served as the most popular bird guide until Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds was published in 1934. In 1895 she followed with a bird book for children, Citizen Bird. She published many other books (27 in all) including a field guide to plants, Flowers and Ferns in Their Haunts (1901) and wrote innumerable articles on conservation issues throughout her life.

Mabel Osgood Wright, with her dog, Lark.

Her passion for birds and concern for the degradation of the environment led Wright to found the Connecticut Audubon Society in 1898 where she espoused a mission of education and legislation. Under her guidance the Connecticut Audubon Society proposed bills and backed legislation on a wide range of conservation topics including regulating hunting (1907), protecting birds and their eggs from collectors (1911), protecting sandpipers (1912), the International Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) and against a bounty on Bald Eagles (1919). It supported the creation of national parks and forest reserves including the White Mountain National Forest. She was elected to the American Ornithologists Union and when the National Association of Audubon Societies was formed in 1905, she joined as one of its founding Board of Directors. This confederation of state organizations was incorporated as the National Audubon Society in 1940, however the Connecticut Audubon Society remained independent as did Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and several other Audubon Societies.

Wright became Associate Editor of Bird-Lore (later the official publication of the National Audubon Society), a bi-monthly publication founded in 1899 by Frank Chapman which was devoted to the study and protection of birds. She held this post for 11 years until 1910 and was then a contributing editor for the rest of her life.

Bird-Lore gave Wright a platform to educate the public on conservation issues with her scientifically accurate and often humorous articles. In her first article she stated what may have been the first seeds of a dream for Birdcraft: “To introduce people to the bird in the bush is the way to create a public sentiment to keep it there…” She pushed a conservation legislative agenda, and after the laws were passed, she tirelessly lobbied for their enforcement. Becoming increasingly alarmed by the loss of bird habitat from cutting firewood and construction, one of her frequent topics was the need to set aside land for “songbird reservations.” She was successful in this effort on a local level when she founded Birdcraft with financial help from her birding friend, Annie Burr Jennings, an heir to a Standard Oil fortune.

Wright’s resolve to found a “songbird reservation” became action after she and some friends went to see a play called “Sanctuary; a Bird Masque” concerning a feather hunter who became a bird conservationist. The play was written to celebrate the opening of the Meriden, New Hampshire, Bird Sanctuary. Declaring, “Connecticut must have a sanctuary and you must make it,” Jennings gave her a free hand in the selection of property. Eventually two parcels were under consideration; a parcel of 100 acres located four miles from town and a ten acre parcel which was close to the center and a short walk from the train station. The smaller parcel won out. It had been a pasture but it had a number of bird friendly trees; pepperidge, wild cherry, oak, maple and cedar, and the slopes contained lots of berry bushes. Its location across the street from Mosswood (Wright’s home) and so near public transportation (better to accommodate visitors) were deciding factors.

As soon as title passed, they set to work. They constructed a “cat-proof fence” around the property, cut trails, planted bird friendly shrubs, built seats, observation shelters, bird baths, a caretaker’s cottage and other amenities. Stones from the property were gathered to make rustic gate posts containing nest holes, walls and a fireplace for a room in the cottage which was to serve as the place for the Connecticut Audubon Society to hold their meetings. They dredged out a pond which was fed by several springs and in early October the pond attracted a Black-bellied Plover, its first record. On October 16, 1914, Birdcraft Sanctuary was opened to the public.

Wright’s original plan was to have the sanctuary be a refuge for birds but also to serve an educational purpose, to allow the public in to observe them and to hold children’s classes. It became so popular with nearly 1,000 visitors in the first month, that the birds disappeared. The next meeting of the Board was a depressing affair. What to do? The public proved unschooled in the ways of bird watching. They rushed about in squads and the children were impatient, playing tag and hide and seek. This was the fall. What would spring be like when the birds were trying to nest? The Board of Governors decided to limit admission and require some sort of qualification for entry, but a different solution soon became evident.

People began bringing in dead birds that they found and wanted to learn about them. The caretaker they had hired, Frank Novak, was not only a gifted birder but also a taxidermist and he stuffed the donated specimens so they could be displayed. After a few weeks of seeing how eager the public was to learn from the mounted specimens it became clear that the best way to introduce people to the birds was to teach identification from the mounts.

They planned a one room museum, 25 x 16 feet, constructed in the same style as the cottage. The walls would have seasonal dioramas populated with the smaller birds that would be seen locally at each season of the year. Larger birds would be displayed on shelves over the dioramas. Again Annie Burr Jennings provided the funding. Work began in late November 1914. A talented board member painted the backgrounds for the dioramas, the accessories for the foregrounds were found objects from the area; portions of fences, small shrubs, etc. Frank Novak mounted the appropriate specimens in life-like poses and they were placed in the dioramas. They decided not to clutter the scenes with name labels and Frank Novak (who had come initially as a construction worker) was to become guide and curator, sharing his vast knowledge of birds, nesting strategies and food preferences.

The pond at Birdcraft shortly after the sanctuary’s creation in 1914. Photo from the Fairfield Museum and History Center.

The museum opened in March and was an instant success. By July 1, 1,300 people had visited, ranging in skill from professional ornithologists to eager school children. Wright also visited the schools and was a familiar sight lugging smaller versions of the dioramas, back and forth from the museum. Nesting was undisturbed as visitors viewed the birds from the museum or in carefully monitored groups with 52 nests discovered that first year.

The “cat proof fence” proved not to be so cat proof after all and Wright walked the trails daily in search of cats, accompanied by her spaniel, Lark. Frank Novak displayed yet another skill, as a marksman, and the cat population dwindled. Records show that 107 cats were taken in the first three years of its operation. The practice of the era was to remove “problem species” including not only invasives like House Sparrows but also such predatory birds as Cooper’s Hawks and Northern Shrikes. Such practices have long been discontinued and modern conservationists would be horrified.

Putting aside this unfortunate aspect of Birdcraft’s history, it became a nationwide model, described in Bird-Lore by Frank Chapman as “an object lesson in conservation and museum methods…. Ten acres cannot harbor many birds nor a little museum in the country be seen by a large number of people, but the idea which they embody can reach to the ends of the earth.” Visitors came from all over the country to examine this educational model. It became the inspiration for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Sanctuary in Oyster Bay after a visit by his widow, seeking a fitting memorial.

Wright died in 1934, but the educational programs continued, the little sanctuary next to the railroad tracks inspiring generations of birders with its intimate displays of the birds of Connecticut. Additions over the years included more dioramas of habitats and a wing donated by the Bedford family to display a collection of African animal mounts. Major change arrived in 1957 with the siting of I-95. Plans called for it to bisect the sanctuary with the highway taking nearly half the land for the highway and a rest stop. Appeals were futile with the State refusing to recognize the land’s value as a sanctuary. The initial offer of $20,000.00 was eventually settled at $42,000.00, no compensation at all for the enormous loss.

Now nestled between the highway and the railroad, it remains a surprising bird magnet, especially during migration when exhausted birds see the little pond and the dense shelter in the midst of all the asphalt. The bird banding program begun in the early 1970’s continues today under the leadership of master bander Judy Richardson with 124 different species banded to date. Educational programs linked with current state curriculum standards are offered to thousands of regional school children annually at the Sanctuary.

Birdcraft Sanctuary and Museum was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and as a National Historic Landmark in 1993. It is a stop on the Connecticut Women’s Heritage Trail. The Connecticut Ornithological Association was founded there in 1981. Its annual Mabel Osgood Wright Award which recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the study and conservation of birds in Connecticut was instituted in her honor.

In 1999 Connecticut Audubon added much needed educational space to the former caretaker’s cottage and restored the building, which was in need of repair. Restoration of the museum itself is underway at this time. Thanks to a major gift, the shell of the building has been stabilized and brought up to code. Funds are being sought to install modern educational exhibits inside, while retaining some of the historic features. The Sasqua Garden Club has adopted Birdcraft’s grounds. Native plants now enhance the exterior in the immediate area of the buildings and Mabel Osgood Wright’s fountain in her beloved wildflower garden has been restored. The commitment to conservation continues.

Originally published in The Connecticut Warbler, the journal of the Connecticut Ornithological Association.

February 1898: The archives tell a story of ambition and success in building a statewide organization to preserve birds

This is the second in a series of short articles about the founding of the Connecticut Audubon Society 125 years ago. It’s based on documents in Connecticut Audubon’s archives, with help from the Fairfield Museum and History Center. Over the coming weeks, we’ll look at the commitment in those early months to teaching school children about birds.

February 12, 2023 — The group of people who founded the Connecticut Audubon Society 125 years ago was small, and everyone in the group was from the small town of Fairfield, population 4,500. But those realities did not hold them back. 

They were ambitious and well-organized, and they had plans to be part of something bigger. They didn’t stay local for long. and they didn’t stay small for long either.

Six women attended an organizing meeting on January 15, 1898, and somewhere between a dozen and 20 attended the first official meeting, on January 28.

A membership certificate dated February 12th, 1898, for Allen Beeman, signed by Mabel Osgood Wright, president, and Harriet S. Glover, secretary. The Rev. Beeman was the long-time rector of St. Paul’s Church in Fairfield. The Connecticut Audubon Society was founded by women. He was probably one of the first two men to become members. The certificate is from the collection of the Fairfield Museum and History Center.

In their eagerness to be part of a bird protection movement spreading across the country, they held meetings every week.

They almost immediately voted to change the name from the Audubon Society of Fairfield County to the Audubon Society of the State of Connecticut — a clear indication that they wanted to be influential in a wider area.

By their fourth official meeting, on February 12, 1898, they had prepared membership certificates and were soon issuing them, not just to the executive committee but to others as well.

The oldest existing certificate that we know of is dated February 12, 1898 — 125 years ago today. It was to Allen E. Beeman, signed by Mabel Osgood Wright, president, and Harriet Glover, secretary.

Beeman was the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fairfield — he went on to be the longest-serving rector (30 years) in the church’s history — and was also a charter member of the Fairfield Historical Society.

At Connecticut Audubon’s meeting of February 5, 1898, he and a Mr. F.J. Kingsbury Jr. were chosen as the organization’s Publication Committee.

If the first two Audubon meetings, on January 15 and 28, were all-female events, as they seem to have been, then Beeman and Kingsbury were probably the first men involved in the organization.

Beeman’s membership certificate is from the archives of the Fairfield Museum and History Center. Connecticut Audubon’s archives contain one certificate as well — for Kathleen Sturges Glover, dated March 19th, 1898.

There were two Glover families involved in the founding of Connecticut Audubon— Helen Glover’s and her cousin-in-law Harriet Glover’s — but in neither family was anyone named Kathleen. However Helen’s eldest daughter was named Katherine Sturges Glover, and it seems possible if not likely that the name “Kathleen” on the membership certificate refers to Katherine.

All of the first meetings of the Audubon Society were held at her house, presided over by her mother. Helen Glover was the organization’s first general secretary and treasurer. At the time she received her membership certificate, Katherine Sturges Glover was five years old.

Our archives also hold a typed reminiscence from the 1950s. There’s no name on it but it might have been written by Katherine Sturges Glover, who would have been 65 years old then.

Some children, the author writes, “like myself, were made members by our parents in 1898. … I do have, as do others, my 1898 original certificate of membership. It is really a thing of much beauty.”

Building a statewide membership — a statewide movement — was on the minds of the board.

From Connecticut Audubon’s archives, a membership certificate dated March 19th, 1898, for 5-year-old Kathleen Sturges Glover, signed by Mabel Osgood Wright and Harriet Glover, the youngster’s aunt..

The executive committee recruited representatives from around the state, called “local secretaries.” A local secretary’s duties were to “send lists of names of those who join to the general secretary and treasurer who will give receipts and issue certificates of membership.”

“It was voted to ask Mrs. S.M. Behrens to become local secretary for Ivoryton

Mrs. E.E. Newell local secretary for Bristol

Mr. Marlow local secretary for Brooklyn

Mrs. Chester Brush Jr. local secretary for Danbury”

A week later, the minutes referred to local secretaries from New Haven, Hartford, Roxbury, Greenwich and Plattsville (an area on the Easton-Fairfield border). By April 2 they also had local secretaries from Farmington, New Canaan, and Wethersfield. 

Those local secretaries were apparently effective. Membership grew. Basic dues were $1 a year, 25 cents for teachers and 10 cents for junior members. “Patronesses” paid more — shortly after the first meeting, Mrs. Melbert Carey of Ridgefield mailed $99 to become a “patroness.”

The minutes from March 12, 1898, report “that there had joined the society eight junior members, forty regular members, thirteen sustaining members, and one patroness.”

And six weeks later, on April 30: “We have now 87 regular members, 23 sustaining, 6 patronesses, 27 junior and 1 teacher.”