Brugia Malayi - Clark Science Center - Smith College

Smith College’s Bird Collection: Accession & History
Diane Chen
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Smith College’s bird collection located in room 205 of the biology department is a treasure trove assemblage of useful teaching
materials and wondrous scientific fascination. The room is filled with 116 mounted and stuffed birds, standing tall above the
students in the vertebrate biology lab, and others curious enough to enter. They pose silently but regally, almost ready to jump
back into life and fly from their taped glass enclosures. Behind their pearly black eyes and pointed beaks are a mystery shrouding
their arrival to Smith College. With no tags or plaques to identify their origin, these birds remain as an untapped wealth of
knowledge in historical significance and scientific research. Multiple stories can explain the accession of these birds to Smith
College. All of the birds mounts however date back to the early 1900s or earlier, when Smith College was becoming established.
The accession of the bird collection could have started in 1885 with Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey’s founding of the
first charter Audubon Society at Smith College. 1 This historical event not only showed women successfully in the forefront
of leadership, but would later trigger many more Audubon charter societies at other schools. The organization of the Smith
College Audubon Society was a response toward the unrighteous slaughtering of whole birds to be adorned on women’s hats
as decoration. 1 Bailey gathered students to campaign to outlaw this crime by showing the public how unjust these killings were.
Articles were written in protest to newspapers.
Bailey was a student at Smith College from 1882 and 1886. 2 She had a great fascination with birds and would later become a
reputable ornithologist. She took a novel step in deviating from how most ornithologists studied birds 2 . Instead of studying the
bird’s “skins” (as was popular at the time), Bailey would guide students on bird walks to observe living birds in their habitat. She
later became an influential writer in the National Audubon Society’s magazine. Bailey did not support the hunting or trapping of
birds, however due to this period of large bird appeal, the bird collection could have been started. 2 Because some of the hats had
whole birds attached, they were well-preserved specimens that could be easily removed and later mounted.
Another speculation on the origin of Smith College’s bird collection was its participation in a larger collection known as
the Wilder Collection. 3 The Wilder Collection dates back from 1902 through 1920, with Professor Harris Hawthorne Wilder as
the main collector. He was a well-known anthropologist who was also interested in salamanders. The most extensive part of his
collection consisted of human skulls and artifacts. Most of the specimens were later given to the University of Massachusetts
Amherst, to be added to their anthropology department. However, in the Smith archives, under the Wilder Collection archive box,
there is a folder that reads “Wilder Collection—Bird Mounts and Human Skulls.” 3 In this folder are a few correspondences about
the bird mounts; however, the majority of the archival material is about the human skull collection and its present whereabouts.
Elizabeth Horner, a Smith College biology professor from 1938 until 1986, had oversight of the Smith College bird
collection as seen in her correspondence with Mary Leprade, a visiting professor by the name of “Elliot,” and Arcadia Wildlife
Sanctuary. 4 On August 30, 1983 Professor Horner wrote to Mary Leprade saying she was “sorting and rearranging the birds” and
also “directing 13 duplicates to an appreciative Arcadia. The correspondence between Leprade and Horner show that the bird
collection definitely was already well established and needed an “update.” In Betty’s letter to the visiting professor “Elliot,” Horner
replies in her letter, ”Please know that it will be my pleasure always to provide you with whatever specimens I can spare from my
personal collection. 5 ” The visiting professor borrowed a blue heron. Horner could have donated some of her own bird mounts to
the collection, if she had any. Because she was a professor from the biology department, her personal collection could also be an
informal description of the already existing Smith College bird collection.
The origin of the bird mounts could also be the Forbes Library. Within the Wilder Collection Bird Mount folder in the
archives is a newspaper article from Hampshire Life, September 22, 1994, about the bird collection on the second floor of the
Forbes Library 6 . Before the 1960s, the Forbes Library carried a vast collection of more than 300 species of birds. Sometime after
the 1960s the birds were moved to the Audubon Society in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Perhaps Smith College had obtained some
bird mounts from the Forbes Library before all of them were moved to Lincoln.
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