May Webster, leaning through a window, feeding a hummingbird by hand
Description:
From a series of photographs of May Webster, known among ornithologists as "The Hummingbird Lady." From her obituary in the 1938 American Ornithologists' Union publication The Auk, vol. 55 no. 2 (Apr. 1938): "May Rogers (Mrs. Laurence J.) Webster, who was elected an Associate of the A. O. U. in 1936, died in Boston on January 7, 1938. Born in Scituate, Massachusetts, the eldest daughter of Thomas L. and Ella S. (Nickerson) Rogers, she spent most of her life since her marriage in 1901, at Holderness, New Hampshire, where her intense interest in Nature found expression in many ways, especially in the attracting of birds about her home and in gardening. Ten years ago she began experiments in taming wild Hummingbirds, and with such success that friends and others came from far and near to see the numbers of these birds that haunted her gardens and sipped from the tubes of sweets that she prepared for them. In 1932, she founded the New Hampshire Nature Camp at Lost River, having obtained for that use the State reservation. Here each summer she personally supervised the conduct of the camp which provided a course under competent instructors to prepare, teachers, camp counselors and others for giving work in nature. Negatives in sleeve 762 are dated Aug. 7, 1942, but must predate, perhaps to 1932, when Webster set up the New Hampshire Nature Camp in 1932 (a copy of a pamphlet for it is pictured in Blackington's coat pocket) and certainly before her death in 1938.
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