Neltje Blanchan

Neltje Blanchan De Graff Doubleday (née De Graff; published as Neltje Blanchan; October 23, 1865 – February 21, 1918) was a United States nature writer on wildflowers and birds, as well as a historian of biological sciences. The Wyoming Arts Council established the Neltje Blanchan Literary Award (now called the Blanchan/Doubleday Writing Award).

Quotes

•         Family Corvidae: CROWS AND JAYS
  The crows are large black birds, walkers, with stout feet adapted for the purpose. Fond of shifting their residence at different seasons rather than strictly migratory, for, except at the northern limit of range, they remain resident all the year. Gregarious. Sexes alike. Omnivorous feeders, being partly carnivorous as are also the jays. Both crows and jays inhabit wooded country. Their voices are boisterous and bold, particularly the jays. Devoted mates; unpleasant neighbors.
  • Bird Neighbors: An Introductory Acquaintance with One Hundred and Fifty Birds Commonly Found in the Gardens, Meadows, and Woods about Our Homes. Nature library. Doubleday, Page & Company. 1918. p. 6.  (234 pages; with introduction by John Burroughs; 1st edition 1897)

• The wind is a wasteful, uncertain pollen distributor. Insects transfer it more economically, especially the more highly organized and industrious ones. In a few instances humming birds, as well, unwittingly do the flower's bidding while they feast now here, now there. In spite of Sprengel's most patient and scientific research, that shed great light on the theory of natural selection a half century before Darwin advanced it, he never knew that flowers are nearly always sterile to pollen of another species when carried to them on the bodies of insect visitors, or that cross-pollenized blossoms defeat the self-pollinated ones in the struggle for survival. These facts Darwin proved in endless experiments.
  ... bees ... are the most diligent of all visitors ... It is estimated that, should they perish, more than half the flowers in the world would be exterminated with them!
  • "Preface". Nature's Garden: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. 1904. pp. v–viii.  (415 pages; quote from p. vii; 1st edition, 1900)

• High up in the air, sometime a mile or more above the earth, if the weather be clear, travel flocks of migrants where they can obtain a bird's-eye view of the country to be traversed. Geese have been detected four miles high. Rivers running like silver threads across the map, mountain ranges, valleys, and the seacoast line, must be far more familiar to the birds that follow them systematically than to Macaulay's schoolboy.
  • How to Attract the Birds: And Other Talks about Bird Neighbors. Doubleday Page & Company. 1902. p. 158.  (224 pages)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Neltje Blanchan on Wikipedia
• Media related to Neltje Blanchan on Wikimedia Commons
• The House Wren by Neltje Blanchan. Section 31 of the The Emerald Story Book, LibriVox.
• The American Flower Garden (1909)