60 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
“worthless” government-owned wet-
lands to those who drained them. Settlers
took the land for timber, farming and the
rich deposits of oil and natural gas. Strat-
ton-Porter spent her life capturing the
landscape before, in her words, it was
“shorn, branded and tamed.” Her impact
on conservation was later compared to
President Theodore Roosevelt’s.
In 1996, conservation groups, includ-
ing the Limberlost Swamp Remembered
Project and Friends of the Limberlost,
began buying land in the area from farm-
ers to restore the wetlands. Drainage tiles
were removed. Water returned. And with
the water came the plants and bird life
Stratton-Porter had described.
One of the movement’s leaders, Ken
Brunswick, remembered reading Strat-
ton-Porter’s What I Have Done With Birds
when he was young—a vibrant 1907 nature
study that reads like an adventure novel.
At a time when most bird studies and illus-
trations were based on dead, stuff ed speci-
mens, Stratton-Porter mucked through the
Limberlost in her swamp outfi t in search of
birds and nests to photograph:
A picture of a Dove that does not
make that bird appear tender and
loving, is a false reproduction. If a
study of a Jay does not prove the fact
that it is quarrelsome and obtrusive
it is useless, no matter how fi ne the
pose or portrayal of markings....A
Dusky Falcon is beautiful and most
intelligent, but who is going to be-
lieve it if you illustrate the statement
with a sullen, sleepy bird?Now, birds once again chorus at the
Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve, which is
part of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites system. Curt
Burnette, a naturalist with the site, calls out, “Sedges have edges,
rushes are round, and grasses are hollow from top to the ground!”
A dozen of us follow him along paths through the prairie grass.
He stops to identify wildfl owers. Here’s beggar’s-ticks. Taste the
mountain mint. Growing at your feet is partridge-pea. Pokeweed,
bottle gentian, white false indigo. That mauve fl ower? Bull thistle.
Dragonfl ies and damselfl ies hover. Salamanders and snakes
are around. I think of Stratton-Porter in her waist-high waders.
GENEVA GRACE STRATTON, who was born on Hopewell
Farm in Wabash County, Indiana, in 1863, the youngest of 12
children, described her childhood as one “lived out-of-doors
with the wild almost entirely.” In her 1919 book Homing With
the Birds she recalled a dramatic childhood encounter. She
was climbing a catalpa tree in search of robins’ nests when
she heard a blast from her father’s rifl e. She watched a red-
tailed hawk tumble from the sky. Before he could lift his weap-
on again, young Geneva bolted along a path and fl ew between
bird and gun. Horrifi ed that he could have shot his daughter,
Mark Stratton pulled up the weapon.
Bleeding and broken, the hawk, she recalled, looked up at
her “in commingled pain, fear, and regal defi ance that drove
me out of my senses.” They transported it to a barn where Ge-
neva cleaned its wounds and nursed it back to health. It nev-
er fl ew again, but it followed her around the farm like a dog,
plaintively calling to other hawks overhead.
Her family gave her the name “Little Bird Woman.”
Not long after, her father, an ordained minister, formally
presented Geneva with “the personal and indisputable owner-