Mar., 1919 69 
OLIVE THORNE MILLER 
By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY 
WITH PHOTO 
noted circle of popular bird writers from the east who found within her 
gates, amid her myriad birds and flowers, rare satisfaction and ministra- 
tion for their declining years. Bradford Torrey, whose last days were spent in 
Santa Barbara, died on October 7, 1912, at the age of sixty-nine, leaving eleven 
bird books; and Mrs. Harriet Mann Miller, better known by her pen name of 
Olive Thorne Miller, whose last years were spent in Los Angeles, died on De- 
ecember 26, 1918, at the ripe age of eighty-seven, also leaving eleven bird books 
as her contribution to bird lore. Both were members of the American Ornith- 
ologists’ Union, Mrs. Miller having joined in 1887 and been made a Member, 
as Mr. Torrey was, when the class of Members was established in 1901. To 
those familiar with the writings of these two there is still further parallelism, 
for in their books we find much the same leisurely literary quality, the charm 
of humor, and the pervading vital interest in the birds whose ways they are 
portraying. 
But while Mr. Torrey was well satisfied to accept the Rambler’s Lease, 
and in his delightful discursive essays, such as those in Nature’s Invitation 
and Field Days in California, man and bird figure with equal interest, Mrs. 
Miller’s greatest happiness was to find the one bird she had perhaps traveled 
hundreds of miles to see, and hour after hour, day after day, and week after 
week, by patient, tireless study, note-book in hand, master the secret of that 
bird’s home life. As she wrote, prefacing her chapters on the Kingbird’s Nest 
and Three Little Kings, which represented nearly two months of field work, 
‘“However familiar the bird, unless the student has watched its ways during 
the only domestic period of its lfe—nesting time—he has still something to 
learn. In fact he has almost everything to learn, for into those two weeks is 
crowded a whole life-time of emotions and experiences which fully bring out 
the individuality of the bird. . . . Moreover, to the devotee of the science that 
someone has aptly called Ornithography, nothing is so attractive. What hopes 
it holds out! Who can guess what mysteries shall be disclosed, what interest- 
ing episodes of life shall be seen around that charmed spot?”’ 
For twenty years she spent from one to three months in the country wateh- 
ing birds, visiting various parts of New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, 
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan, Utah, Colorado, and Califor. 
nia; accumulating the material which appeared in With the Birds in Maine, 
Upon the Tree Tops, True Bird Stories from My Note Books, In Nesting Time, 
Little Brothers of the Air, and A Bird Lover in the West. In New York and 
Utah I was with her and found that her one thought was to make an exhaustive 
study of birds unconscious of observation, a method which gave peculiar value 
to her work. To me, at that time, birds were companions from whom | wanted 
some response, but when I answered their ealls and tried to get them to talk to 
me in her presence, I felt rebuked; she would never intrude upon them in that 
BD act AGAIN California is called upon to mourn the loss of one of a 
