ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 7 



Crowned Kinglets that may have decided to be winter guests in such 

 favorable surroundings. In a home with such a setting and among 

 books and paintings and other tokens of refinement, Miss Drummond 

 keeps in touch with the organizations which especially in their formative 

 periods owed so much to her untiring support — the Audubon Society, the 

 Illinois Humane Society, etc. — and maintains close relations with the 

 activities of the church in which she has long been an aggressive worker. 



Miss Drummond was born at Galena, Illinois. Her parents were of 

 Scotch ancestry though both were native-born Americans, the mother 

 coming from Maine, the father, Thomas Drummond, having been born 

 at Detroit. Thomas Drummond was educated for the law and came to 

 Chicago in 1835 looking for an opening. He found then that the bar 

 at Galena enrolled an abler and more influential membership than that 

 of Chicago and so the young lawyer went on to Galena to secure better 

 opportunities for association with men of eminence in his profession. Upon 

 the maturity of his powers came his appointment as United States Circuit 

 Judge which necessitated his removal with his family to Chicago. Mary 

 Drummond was then eight years old and so was destined to spend her 

 school days and her earlier womanhood among the interesting and rapidly 

 shifting scenes of the Chicago of that day. In the volume of reminis- 

 cences entitled, "Chicago Yesterdays," edited by Miss Caroline Kirkland. 

 Miss Drummond has furnished a chapter wmich entertainingly sets forth 

 her impressions of the period. 



When in his later years Judge Drummond retired from the bench he 

 moved at first to his farm near Winfield and later to Wheaton where his 

 death occurred. It w T as while living at Wheaton that Miss Drummond 

 enrolled in the Illinois Audubon Society and began the work of the sec- 

 retaryship. At that time the fields were conspicuously ripe for the harvest 

 and the workers truly were few. A very considerable proportion of 

 womankind in that day w r ore decorations of stuffed birds in their hats and 

 the economic point of view for the protection of bird life had not yet 

 been given much publicity. The game warden for Illinois, Mr. Charles H. 

 Blow, reported to the Illinois Audubon Society in the first year of its 

 existence that there was a great need for the education of teachers as w^ell 

 as pupils in the matter of bird protection. He had discovered many 

 villages and some city schoolrooms decorated with strings of birds' eggs 

 and had found that some of the teachers of the schools were in the habit 

 of offering prizes to the scholars who in a given time would rob the most 

 birds' nests. The defense of such actions was that nest-robbing was a 

 proper practice because it "makes pupils observing." 



All this seems ancient history now though it is not so very long ago. 

 The great change coming about so rapidly in the attitude of young and 

 old from heartless indifference and positive cruelty to bird life to that of 

 general interest in birds and their protection speaks of the intelligent 

 planning of educational w r ork which engrossed the attention of Miss 

 Drummond and her associates from the start. It has surely been a great 

 privilege to participate in the campaign of education, state and national, 

 of the Audubon movement which has accomplished so much in the twenty 

 or so years of its history. Between the lines of Miss Drummond's compact 

 summary of the activities of the Illinois Society during her secretaryship, 



