Cordelia Stanwood as a young woman. The Stanwood Wildlife Sanctuary
Cordelia Stanwood was a woman ahead of her time. In an era when women were given little recognition, she received acclaim for her thorough observations of birds. She was raised to be a lady and to pursue domestic activities. However, she turned out to be one of the “new women” in the changing world around her.
Cordelia, called Cordie, was born in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1865. Her father, Roswell Leland Stanwood, was a merchant sailing captain. Her mother, Margaret (Maggie) Susan Bown, was from a prominent family in Canada. They married in 1864. Until Cordie was almost eight years old, she, her mother, and her little sisters accompanied her father on his voyages. Maggie didn’t like life at sea and was often seasick. She was much happier when they returned to the house on Tinker’s Hill in Ellsworth. Grandma Stanwood lived with them most of the time, and she taught Cordie about the family history and how to do needlework.
Cordie loved to roam the pastures, woods, and streams surrounding the house. One of her earliest memories was gathering strawberries and a mess of dandelion greens for Grandma Stanwood.
She remembered, “Another custom that my grandmother … had was to go out to spend the day with a friend. She would take me by the hand to walk with her to Mrs. Charles De Saittre’s farm or Mrs. Lemuel Jordan’s. I enjoyed going to Mrs. Jordan’s particularly because she had a daughter, a young lady named Sarah, who would take me to walk in the woods.”
She continued, “A roaring little stream ran through the Jordan land and poured into the Union River. Once there had been a mill over the brook. Some of the huge timbers still served as a footway across Card brook. The mosses in the woodland were numerous and luxuriant. Sarah would take a basket and we would gather a beautiful selection of mosses to arrange in deep plates when we returned home.”
She also had pleasant memories of her father, and told this story:
At one time, Father owned a small sailboat. To our delight but to Mother’s dismay, he offered to take us children and two of the neighboring children for a boat ride one day. As it happened, there was a brisk wind when we set out, and the boat skimmed over the waves gloriously. To my mother at home, this fine breeze seemed like a hurricane. Father caught several small fish and stopped at Shady Nook on the Union River to dress them. At a farmhouse he bought some milk, and after kindling a fine fire of driftwood, cooked a most delicious fish chowder. We famished youngsters felt sure we had never tasted so good a chowder before.
Cordie’s grandmother taught her to read by showing her words for pictures of things she loved—trees, flowers, and animals. She also attended Ellsworth primary schools off and on.
When she was 14, her parents decided that she should go to Providence to live with her Aunt Cordelia, her father’s sister, and her Uncle Oliver Johnson. Here she would be able to go to high school and be trained as a teacher.
On her arrival, she told Aunt Cordelia, “I have planned to earn my living by teaching.” She lived with them and attended school for seven years. She took several botany courses in school. Her uncle often took her with him to his family farm in East Greenwich. She learned from him to be curious about the natural world.
Cordie graduated from Girl’s English High School in 1886. She went back to Ellsworth to search for a job but was unable to find one, so she enrolled in a teacher training course in Providence. She enjoyed her year of training, but got a cold that hung on for weeks. Both the doctor and her aunt urged her to quit, but she said, “I have planned to earn my living by teaching and I can do no otherwise than to continue the course.”
She got a teaching job when she finished. Wages were low, especially for women teachers. Most women planned to teach for only a few years until they found a husband. Married women were not allowed to teach. But Stanwood planned a career in teaching.
Teachers were expected to study during the summers to improve their teaching skills. For several years, Stanwood attended Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute. The two months at the seaside resort combined learning with rest and recreation by the sea. The school had a good reputation for teaching progressive methods and ideas. They had courses in nature study, photography, science, and the New Method of drawing.
Here Stanwood was able to enjoy a serious study of botany. She also learned new methods of teaching nature study and drawing. She made friends and many professional contacts. Professor Henry Turner Bailey taught some of the drawing courses, and he was to have a great influence on her. She corresponded with him for many years and became friends with his sisters.
She was also influenced by naturalist John Burroughs, who gave lectures and led hikes at one of the schools where she taught. She learned from him to write only what she observed and not to exaggerate or fictionalize.
After four years of teaching, even though Stanwood was primary principal of her school, she only made $700 a year, which was hardly enough to live on comfortably. Since art teachers earned higher salaries, she saved her money and took a course at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. This qualified her to teach drawing in the Massachusetts public schools. She taught art for several years.
Lighthouse at Martha’s Vineyard.
Library of Congress LG-DIG-highsm-12128
In 1894, Stanwood became co-supervisor of art in the Springfield, Massachusetts, schools. However, she was dismissed from this job at spring vacation of her second year. Professor Bailey told his sister he knew of no other reason but jealousy.
Stanwood then served in Greenfield for a year as supervisor of art. Her job was to visit all the one-room schools to oversee the teaching of art. She had to learn to drive a horse and buggy in order to get from school to school. She only stayed a year because she couldn’t face another winter of driving the buggy.
Stanwood identified her first bird while living in Greenfield. She remembered, “I heard my little friend, the black-throated green warbler for the first time that day. It seemed to me wonderful that the lady [her friend] could hear that sweet strain in the tree … and recognize the musician without any effort.”
John Burroughs.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-130730
Naturalist John Burroughs was important in the conservation movement in the United States. Born in 1837 on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains in New York, he became the most popular writer of nature essays since Thoreau.
As a boy, Burroughs was very interested in learning. His father didn’t think higher education was necessary and refused to help him go to college. Bur-roughs got a job teaching and went to college part-time.
In 1857 he married Ursul a North, a girl from back home. He sold his first essay to Atlantic Monthly in 1860. At first the editor thought he had plagiarized work from Ralph Waldo Emerson because their writing styles were so similar.
Burroughs became friends with writer Walt Whitman, who encouraged him to develop his nature writing. Some of his best essays were about his native Catskill Mountains.
Burroughs was friends with many famous people of the time, including Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. He often traveled and camped with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.
Most of his life Burroughs was lucky enough to have good physical and mental health. A few months before his death, he began having memory lapses. In February 1921, he had surgery to remove an abscess from his chest. His health went downhill after that, and he died the next month. He was buried on his 84th birthday.
Stanwood taught at several other places over the next few years. She taught drawing in the evenings to make enough money to live on and to send home to help her family.
In the fall of 1904, Stanwood resigned. She said she had a nervous breakdown and needed to rest, so she checked herself into the Adams Nervine Asylum, a mental health hospital that said it treated “nervous people who are not insane.” When she left the hospital, she went back home. Doctors may have suggested she go to a secluded place where she could rest and recover. She planned to go back to teaching eventually, but never did.
Stanwood was living with her elderly parents and a young brother she barely knew, since he was born about the time she left home. She suffered from severe migraine headaches and depression throughout the winter. When spring came and she was able to get outside, she began to heal. She believed that being outside in nature kept her mentally healthy. She really didn’t like being inside, doing domestic work, although she did help her mother with some of the housework.
By now, birds had become very important to Stanwood. “I never had time to study the birds until I stopped teaching,” she said. She was determined to earn a living by writing about birds. She began her serious bird study, keeping field notes of birds she identified and their behavior. Her bird studies were based on the scientific method she had learned in her classes at Martha’s Vineyard.
Not much was known about nesting behavior of birds, so Stanwood decided to make that her specialty. She was very good at finding nests and getting close to them. Early in her studies, she would take a baby bird out of the nest and take it to town to get photos made of it. Photographer Embert Osgood in Ellsworth photographed the birds for her. At that time, it was considered safe to remove the birds from the nests as long as you put them back. In 1912, Stanwood got her own camera. Now she could photograph the birds right in the nest. She sometimes still took the babies out and posed them on a branch to take their pictures.
It was not easy to photograph birds in the nest. Stanwood had to have enough light on her subject. She also had to put up with wind, rain, and mud. Sometimes she tied back branches that were in the way. Some of the nest sites were three miles from her house. And she had to carry heavy equipment while crossing streams.
Cordelia’s camera.
The Stanwood Wildlife Sanctuary
When she went to the woods to observe birds, Stanwood wore a long skirt and high rubber boots. She often took neighborhood children with her to help carry her equipment. She enjoyed teaching them about the birds as they helped her.
Stanwood’s photo of a mother bird feeding a baby.
The Stanwood Wildlife Sanctuary
Stanwood’s family owned 40 acres, and she wandered three miles beyond it in all directions. She watched birds in pastures, woodlands, bogs, brooks, ponds, and rivers. She found out new facts about warblers, chickadees, woodpeckers, and thrushes and reported them to other ornithologists, people who studied birds. Within five years she had become known for her extensive knowledge about birds. The community thought she was a little strange, but they proudly referred to her as Ellsworth’s Famous Birdwoman.
Sometimes Stanwood built blinds (places to hide while observing birds) out of brush or canvas. She would sit there for many hours, observing the birds. It got hot in the summer and bugs crawled all over her, but she just caught them and saved them to feed to the baby birds!
Stanwood never developed her own photos because her house didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. So she had to pay Embert Osgood to process them for her. Stanwood wanted to document the development of the baby birds by taking photos over a period of time at the nest. She always tried to get an artistic portrait of the birds.
Cordelia studying birds.
The Stanwood Wildlife Sanctuary
She worried about the birds in bad weather. Stanwood once wrote, “I was out in Dyer Jordan’s woods at the feet of a Redstart by 6:15. By 10 o’clock I was in the woods again, wet through. The rainstorm continued all that day, pouring violently in the afternoon and evening and all day Sunday…. I thought of the little mother Redstart, without even a leaf to cover her, sitting there with that heavy rain falling on her during the long, cold night.”
Red-breasted nuthatch.
Many magazines bought Stanwood’s articles and photos of birds. Scientific magazines didn’t pay a lot, but she was becoming well-known in the field of ornithology. The June 1910 issue of The Auk mentioned her in its “Bird Notes” column. Ora Willis Knight, a Maine ornithologist, wrote: “Recently I asked Miss Cordelia J. Stanwood … if she would not get careful measurements and a description of the bird for me, knowing she was a careful observer and bird student…. In connection with Miss Stanwood’s description and my own distant view of the bird I have no hesitation in pronouncing it a Whistling Swan, a bird new to Maine.” It was unusual for a scientist to put that much trust in a woman’s work at that time.
Learn what eight common birds in your area eat.
First, use a bird guidebook or website to identify eight common birds in your area. Then make a list of typical foods these birds eat, foods that you can find or purchase. Birds vary greatly in the kinds of food they prefer. Although many birds like black oil sunflower seeds, there are many other preferences. Suet—hard fat mixed with seeds, nuts, and fruit—is the food of choice for woodpeckers and is also enjoyed by chickadees and nuthatches. The same birds love shelled peanuts. Blue jays like peanuts in the shell. Wild turkeys and quail like corn scattered on the ground. Niger seed is the food of choice for goldfinches, while orioles love orange halves.
Now see how many of these eight species you can attract to your yard by offering them the kind of food they like.
The Auk also noted that Stanwood had had articles published in a number of magazines. “Recent Bird Biographies by Miss Stanwood: numerous sketches of birds and their nesting activity have appeared during the last few years from the pen of Miss Stanwood, all of them evidently based upon careful study and written in a style that is pleasing and yet serious enough to suit the importance of many of the facts that are recorded.” Stanwood published 20 of these nesting bird studies between 1910 and 1917.
Her friend Henry Turner Bailey read one of her articles and sent her this note: “My dear Miss Stanwood: I received the other day a copy of ‘Nature and Culture’ with your article on the red-breasted nuthatch. How well you do this sort of thing! You stand a fair chance of becoming famous as a naturalist.”
Besides writing about birds, Stanwood had articles published in teaching magazines. She also wove baskets and hooked and braided rugs to sell. In later years, she wrote educational and entertaining articles about birds for popular magazines. They also used her photos. These magazines paid more than the scientific journals, and she could sell the photos over and over to different magazines.
Egret.
Stanwood was involved in politics at one time. She worked with her friend Fannie Eckstrom to get public support for a ban on selling feathers. Millions of birds were being killed for their feathers so women could use them to decorate hats.
Photo of Stanwood in later years.
The Stanwood Wildlife Sanctuary
Stanwood wrote a letter entitled “A Plea for the Birds” to the editor of the Ellsworth American. She described the horrors of hunting the white egrets for their feathers. Hunters would kill hundreds of adult birds, skin them, and leave the bodies to rot and their babies to die of starvation. Last-minute telegrams that Stanwood sent to legislators helped to sway them and the ban passed. Now she became known as a conservation activist as well as an expert ornithologist.
Stanwood continued to keep her notebooks until she was 88 years old. She donated her collection of photos to Acadia National Park, which is near her home. She gave her notes to the Ellsworth Bird Club. She fed birds in the yard at Birdsacre, her home, until she had to move to an assisted living facility when she was 90. Stan-wood died at the age of 93.
Soon after Stanwood’s death, a bird club member, Chandler Richmond, told the Rotary Club about her accomplishments. Rotary member Harvey Phillips, president of a local bank, was so impressed that he told Richmond he would back him if he bought Birdsacre. They restored the house and opened it as a bird sanctuary and museum.
If you visit Birdsacre, you can walk the paths that Stanwood walked while observing her nesting birds. You can go through the house and see the furniture that was there when she was alive. All her papers are also there.
Sign at Birdsacre.
You can make a simple bird feeder that many birds will like.
Acadia National Park.
Library of Congress LC-DIG-highsm
Acadia National Park is located along the rugged coast of Maine, near Bar Harbor. It was the first national park east of the MississippiRiver.CadillacMountain,thehighestpeakon the Atlantic Coast, is located within the park.
The park is a wonderful place for birdwatching, with 270 species breeding here. Small birds include warblers, chickadees, woodpeckers, and tanagers. Peregrine falcons and bald eagles nest on the cliffs. Along the ocean are gulls, gannets, and other seabirds.
You can also enjoy many other activities within the park, including climbing, fishing, hiking, swimming, picnicking, and boating. There are even activities just for kids.