In 1962, Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" warned against the overuse of human-made pesticides and chemicals and their potential to harm all living creatures. It was the thought of losing birds that got everyone’s attention because, let’s face it, most people love birds. This avian affection has inspired many people to care about the natural world — including Carson and Florida's three Marjories.
Editor’s Note: Leslie Kemp Poole pens Lessons from the Marjories, a column meditating on the legacies of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Harris Carr, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
A spring without birds, their songs, their colorful wings whisking through the air.
This was a simple image—and a very possible future—that set the world on fire in 1962 when Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring.” In the best-seller, Carson warned that the overuse of human-made pesticides and chemicals, which she called “biocides,” had the power to kill or hurt all living creatures, even humans.
The thought of losing birds got everyone’s attention because, let’s face it, most people love birds. This avian affection has inspired many people to care about the natural world — including Carson and the three Marjories about which this column regularly “crows.”
Carson, introduced to bird watching by her mother, found it a lifelong source of joy. She enjoyed birding trips in the mountains and shores of several states as well as “countless morning bird walks abound Washington [D.C.],” according to biographer Linda Lear. Many of these jaunts were associated with her membership in local Audubon societies. For Carson, a love of birds was an “important source of her love of the natural world,” Lear writes.
In her book, Carson argued that overuse of chemicals already was impacting bird populations, including the devastating toll that the pesticide DDT was inflicting on birds of prey, such as the bald eagle. The possibility of a truly silent spring, she wrote, “may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.”
A love of birds also inspired Marjorie Harris Carr, who spent her childhood in Bonita Springs in southwest Florida. Her parents taught her how to “classify thousands of plants, animals, minerals, and other natural objects,” laying the foundation for her lifelong interest in the natural world, writes biographer Peggy Macdonald. Carr and her parents canoed almost daily on the nearby Imperial River. There she witnessed the devastation that unregulated hunting took on the wildlife, particularly birds killed in the early twentieth century to adorn women’s hats.
“You didn’t see a living thing of any size on the river’s edge,” Carr told me in a 1991 interview. “Because it was the custom for men to come down, hire a boat, take a gun and stand up in the front of the boat, and shoot anything that made a moving target. Alligator, red bird, heron, what have you. Anything that moved was the sport. That outrage, that stupidity of killing every, anything called attention to the plight of the wildlife.”
Decades later, after earning a master’s degree in zoology, Carr channeled her passion for nature conservation into participation in the Alachua Audubon Society. In the 1960s, she said, there were two kinds of Audubon societies: those for birdwatching and the more modern model of activism protecting “environments for not just birds but for wildlife.” Alachua Audubon was the latter type.
While she was Alachua Audubon’s co-chair of programs, Carr learned that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned to dig a channel across northern Florida, damaging her beloved Ocklawaha River. The group’s questioning of the project was the genesis of a years-long battle to stop the Cross Florida Barge Canal, with Carr as the opposition’s leader. Their efforts ultimately halted the boondoggle before its completion, attaining a national victory for the environment and an inspiration for generations to come.
“The most dreadful menace to all birds everywhere in our country, as to other forms of life, and to ourselves, however, is man. His frightening intelligence, his stupidity, his thoughtlessness, is almost suicidal…”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Everglades writer and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas took up birding after moving to Miami in 1915. In her 1969 book, “The Joys of Bird Watching in Florida,” Douglas wrote that Florida has always been recognized as the “finest place on the continent for the study and enjoyment of birds.” She shared that “in the observation and knowledge of birds we may all find an increased sense of rest and recreation, detachment, release, and delight.”
Douglas, who alerted readers as early as 1947 that the lovely, unique Everglades system was in trouble, now worried about America’s birds.
“As Rachel Carson emphasized in her great book, ‘Silent Spring,’ “if we do not take some action now against our own criminal carelessness, the wings will be gone from our gardens and the bird songs of the world silenced forever,” Douglas wrote. She warned about air and soil pollution as well. “The most dreadful menace to all birds everywhere in our country, as to other forms of life, and to ourselves, however, is man. His frightening intelligence, his stupidity, his thoughtlessness, is almost suicidal…”
Douglas knew that spectacular populations of birds that once made the Everglades their home were greatly diminished from hunting and habitat loss. “The sight of vast white birds streaming home to their rookeries from the feeding grounds, where their protection began, against a sunset and afterglow and moonrise, is one of the unforgettable sights of Florida.”
In her book for amateur birders, Douglas described many species and singled out the cardinal, commonly called red bird, as “the gayest, the most dashing, and best loved bird in all our parks and gardens, frisking out of hedges, flashing across marshy thickets, and brightening the pine lands.”
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings likely felt the same. In her 1942 semi-autobiographical book “Cross Creek,” Rawlings mentioned the great variety of birds that populated the yard of her rural home and watched as their activities changed with Florida’s seasons. Red birds held a particular interest.
In the sweltering summer, the “redbirds lift their wings and open their bills to cool themselves,” Rawlings observed. “They seem to discover newly the bird-bath and instead of taking a casual wetting, splash themselves all over for minutes at a time. They are angry when the water has not been changed and is too warm, and fly back and forth across the yard, scolding human thoughtlessness. When fresh cool water is put in the bath, the word goes out, and a dozen are there, scattering the water for yards around.”
Rawlings’ bird observations and her knowledge about life at the Creek and the hardships and joys her neighbors experienced led her to muse about the human relationship with nature. When the question arose: “Who Owns Cross Creek?” Rawlings wondered if any person could actually own land. Looking across her yard and grove, she thought of the many birds that had lived there and raised generations of families. “The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves,” she wrote, adding a final passage in the book that summed up her philosophy — and mine.
“Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages. And after I am dead, who am childless, the human ownership of grove and field and hammock is hypothetical. But a long line of red-birds and whippoorwills and blue-jays and ground doves will descend from the present owners of nests in the orange trees, and their claim will be less subject to dispute than that of any human heirs.” She concluded: “Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.”
Leslie Kemp Poole, PhD, is associate professor of environmental studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She is author of “Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century” and former executive director of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society. Poole is an editor of the recently released book “Tracing Florida Journeys: Explorers, Travelers, and Landscapes Then and Now.”
Cover photo – Northern cardinal. Photo credit: Sandhillcrane, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
