Louise de Kiriline Lawrence

The daughter of a naturalist, born in Sweden in 1894, Mrs. Lawrence was a translator and delegate of the Swedish Red Cross. She took part in an expedition to the Volga region during the famine of 1922. She and her husband Leonard Lawrence settled in the lake-country wilderness of Ontario about 180 miles north of Toronto. Her books on nature included A Comparative Life History of Four Species of Wood Peckers, which was undertaken at the urging of her friend, Margaret Morse Nice. The Lovely and the Wild was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing by the American Ornithologists' Union.

Were I in imagination to put myself in the place of birds, the night is certainly the time I would choose to fly amid the stars, through or above the transparencies of the clouds in a medium of nothing that supports me as on a pillar of distance from the earth. The Lovely and the Wild, 1968.

 

Strummed from the mysterious green depths, the harp of the unseen hermit thrush strikes its chords in the high register and the lovely melody trails to an end in an almost inaudible pianissimo, delivered with a detachment nothing else upon this earth can imitate. Ibid.

 

All along the shores of Pimisi Bay and the Mattawa River we pass from concert to concert. If the thrushes and the wrens and the waterthrushes with their elaborate and striking themes must be considered the star artists of these dawn recitals, dozens of others&endash;warblers, vireos, white-throated sparrows&endash;supply a varied accompaniment . . . Ibid.

 

Song is the bird's assertion of presence, possession, and sexual need. Ibid.

 

Nature is a deep reality and whether we understand it or not it is true and elemental. Ibid.

 

To learn how to identify a bird by its general outline, markings, and behavior as a species belonging to a certain family or order was a new and thrilling occupation, and so it remains, I think, forever new, forever thrilling throughout life with every watcher of birds. Ibid.

 

. . . I was to be introduced into a new intellectual environment which culminated in my first meeting with Margaret Nice. World famous as a student of bird behavior, this remarkable and gifted friend took hold of my purpose, and my work, and the whole of my thought life in fact, and as gently as the wind blowing from the south in the spring, as gently and as surely, changed all of it. Ibid.