Margaret Morse Nice

Margaret Morse Nice
Nice studying a nest of baby field sparrows (1956)
Born	December 6, 1883 Amherst, Massachusetts
Died	June 26, 1974(1974-06-26) (aged 90) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	United States
Fields	Ornithology

Margaret Morse Nice (December 6, 1883 – June 26, 1974) was an American ornithologist who made an extensive study of the life history of the song sparrow and was author of Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow (1937).

Nice was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. The daughter of Anson D. Morse, Professor of History at Amherst College, and Margaret Duncan (Ely), she was the fourth child with two older brothers Ely and William, an elder sister Sarah, a younger sister Katherine and two younger brothers, Harold and Edward.

In her autobiography Research Is a Passion With Me (1979), she wrote that "the most cherished Christmas present of my life came in 1895. Mabel Osgood Wright's Bird-Craft." This book had color illustrations of birds and it guided her to keep notes on local birds when she was twelve years old. With careful note making she was even able to compare her notes taken when she was 13 years old and compare the rates of fledgling success of young American robins, chipping sparrows, and least flycatchers 61 years later.

She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1906 and M.A. in biology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1915. At Clark University she was only one of two women graduate students. During this time she produced the first comprehensive study on the diet of the northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus).

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.