In a 1948 profile, The New Yorker called Rosalie Edge “the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation.” Here, Edge poses with guests at the Pennsylvania's Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, which she founded in 1934. Photo courtesy Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
by John Clayton
In September 1932, a small environmental advocacy
organization called the Emergency Conservation Committee published a pamphlet,
“The Slaughter of the Yellowstone Park Pelicans,” which demanded that the
National Park Service stop killing birds for the sin of eating fish. It was a
remarkable document for several reasons: First, few people then knew that
Yellowstone even harbored American white pelicans—and thus even fewer could
appreciate the birds’ role in an ecological system. Second, the ECC consisted
primarily of Rosalie Barrow Edge, a wealthy New York City birdwatcher who had never
visited Yellowstone nor had any training in the sciences. Third, park leaders
denied ever killing pelicans. Edge had amassed proof they were lying.
Among East Coast birders, Edge is a cult hero. She founded
Pennsylvania’s Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the world’s first refuge for birds of
prey. Today, you can visit Hawk Mountain for close-up views of raptors in their
natural environment. You can also learn the inspirational story of Edge’s 1930s
battles with professional conservationists—especially at what before 1940 was
called the National Association of Audubon Societies—to give predators and
ecology due respect.
Rosalie Edge was arguing for a radical new standard for national parks: that they protect animals for their beauty and rarity, not their usefulness or tastiness.
Edge was in the room in the fall of 1933 when an activist
pointed out that Hawk Mountain, where men liked to gather and shoot hundreds of
birds per day, was available for purchase for back taxes. It could be transformed
into a sanctuary. She heard Audubon leaders commit to making the purchase. So,
when they didn’t follow through, she bought the land herself. Her loyalty was
to birds, not an institution like Audubon. Its leaders later offered to buy the
sanctuary from her, and she told them to take a hike.
What makes this story particularly interesting today is that
she brought this same confrontational attitude to her 1930s crusade on behalf
of Yellowstone’s pelicans. As we consider the legacy of Rosalie Edge, we can ponder
difficult questions: What is the appropriate relationship between activists and
institutions? Between populism and expertise, outsiders and insiders, innovation
and funding, or rabble-rousing and results?
AN IMPLACABLE WOMAN
Edge described herself as a plain-featured woman with a
sharp nose and receding chin. She was tall and stooped and always dressed
formally. She was born in 1877 to wealth, raised in a 15-room home on New York’s
Upper East Side. In 1909 she married British civil engineer Charles Noel Edge,
and after three years of work in Asia, he became a New York investor and they
raised two children.
“She cut her teeth as an activist in the suffragist
movement,” says author Michelle Nijhuis, who wrote about Edge in her delightful
2021 book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.
“For Edge, as for many women of means, this hard-charging, vital movement was a
first step into the public sphere. And she found that she had a taste for it.”
Hard-charging Rosalie Edge. Photo by Carsten Lien, courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 42001
The 1910s suffrage movement challenged a set of institutions
and moneyed old white men bent on excluding Edge and others like her. In the
1920s, when she fell in love with birds amid the painful end of her marriage,
she brought to the conservation movement her finely honed activist skills and
willingness to be confrontational.
Edge focused first on Audubon, writing letters of complaint
and attending meetings to ask difficult questions. “She was expressive and well-spoken,”
Nijhuis tells Mountain Journal. At the time, most conservation funding
came from gunmakers, and most conservationists were hunters, so most attention
focused on species they liked to hunt.
“She had a prescient grasp of ecology, which was then a very
young science,” Nijhuis says. Edge had no formal training but was highly
intelligent and well-connected among ecologically minded scientists.
Edge and some scientist friends formed the ECC to take
ecological issues straight to the public. They used pamphlets, a format that
had been swaying public opinion since at least the American Revolution. Pamphleteering
took advantage of Edge’s skills in writing and design; it also allowed the activists
to avoid gatekeepers. At first, Edge tried to take a back seat—the pamphlets’
masthead simply listed her as the organization’s secretary. But as the ECC
gained an increasing public profile, it needed a public face. Although she
never took a salary, “Mrs. C. N. Edge” and the ECC became one and the same.
"ARE THE YELLOWSTONE PARK PELICANS 'VERMIN'?"
In June 1931, the ECC published a four-page pamphlet titled
“The Last of the White Pelican.” It argued that these large, awkwardly
beautiful birds were in danger of extinction around the nation, in part because
people perceived nearly all predators as vermin. The pamphlet provided some
basic science on pelicans’ migratory and breeding habits. It excoriated the U.S.
Biological Survey (predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and
several Western states for failing to protect them. A subheading then asked,
“Are the Yellowstone Park pelicans ‘vermin’?”
The pamphlet cited “disagreeable rumors” surrounding pelican
populations in the park. It suggested that amid declining numbers of trout, anglers
and park managers had blamed pelicans, though surely other factors must be at
work. “But even supposing the birds did affect the number of fish in the lakes,
to what better use can a few of the Yellowstone trout be put than to enable
these splendid birds to live and raise their young and escape extinction?”
American white pelicans snack on the Yellowstone River. Edge worked to protect the pelican from extinction. Photo courtesy Openverse
The pamphlet “caused a lot of trouble,” writes James A.
Pritchard in the 1999 book Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions:
Science and the Perception of Nature. Edge was arguing for a radical new
standard for national parks: that they protect animals for their beauty and
rarity, not their usefulness or tastiness. Although she didn’t use the word ecology,
and stopped short of saying that predation was valuable, she was
challenging conventional views.
“It was a time of change,” Alicia Murphy, Yellowstone’s
official historian, tells Mountain Journal. “The Park Service as an organization
was less than two decades old and had a young understanding of both its mission
and the resource values of the park. National parks needed public support to
get appropriations from Congress. So, the Park Service saw visitation as
crucial—and fishing was an even bigger driver of visitation then than it is
now.”
At the time, most people divided animals into “good” and
“bad” species. The bad species—such as wolves, coyotes and hawks—typically
killed the good species, and thus deserved extermination. Pelicans do eat
voraciously: up to 40 percent of their body mass per day in prey. In some
nationwide locations, that up-to-3.3 pounds of daily fish intake comes from less
coveted species. But according to the 2023 book, Yellowstone’s Birds:
Diversity and Abundance in the World’s First National Park, “The primary
source for fish-eating birds on Yellowstone Lake has historically been the
Yellowstone cutthroat trout.”
Regardless of their diets, Edge refused to see beautiful
creatures like hawks and pelicans as bad. “She saw an egregious betrayal
of Yellowstone’s values,” Murphy says.
Edge was far from alone. Scientists inside and outside the
Park Service were simultaneously defending the pelican, sometimes even trying
to compare the relative benefits to humans of birdwatching versus recreational
fishing. In the spring of 1932, Yellowstone Superintendent Roger Toll collected
lots of information and opinions, including those of his predecessor Horace
Albright, now the Park Service director. But the ECC pamphlet, Pritchard
writes, played a big role. Toll came to agree with Edge: pelicans should not be
killed.
“Here was this woman in New York City who was doing things in conservation—very militant, very strident, very abrasive, but she was doing things. Getting things done.” – Maurice Brown, future Hawk Mountain employee, as quoted by Stephen Fox, author, John Muir and his Legacy
On May 21, 1932, “Toll decided to protect the pelican, [and]
he essentially redefined Yellowstone’s purpose in concrete terms,” Pritchard
writes. “Yellowstone Park would protect the native wild animals not only when
convenient for visiting fishermen but in every instance. Nature, in other
words, took precedence over human uses.”
In retrospect, this was a big deal. The philosophy would
shape Yellowstone’s wildlife management; for example, it was an essential early
step toward the 1995 reintroduction of wolves. But back in 1932, it was an
obscure, unpublicized and potentially reversible change in bureaucratic policy.
At least, until Rosalie Edge spoke up again.
"ALL SHE WANTS IS MATERIAL FOR PUBLICITY"
Four months after Toll’s decision, the ECC published the
12-page pamphlet “The Slaughter of the Yellowstone Park Pelicans.” It said that
pelicans in the park had been “subjected to persistent secret persecution and
have only narrowly escaped entire extermination.”
The pamphlet quoted a 1928 Albright letter saying that “no
pelicans have been killed” except for a few scientific specimens. It then quoted
at length from an anonymous whistleblower. This former ranger described how
beginning in 1923, rangers stomped on pelican eggs and clubbed chicks to death,
under apparent orders from Superintendent Albright. The whistleblower enclosed
reports and correspondence that further demonstrated a sustained cover-up.
Edge also reprinted several pelican-friendly letters and
memos that had gone into Toll’s decision-making process. But she was
Edge poses with a hawk, 1947. Photo courtesy Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
apparently
unaware of his decision. After also criticizing the state of Montana, the
Biological Survey, and especially Audubon, the pamphlet concluded with a call
to action for readers to write the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to protest
Yellowstone’s killing of pelicans.
The Park Service and Audubon were tempted to ignore the
pamphlet, Pritchard writes. They saw Edge as a sentimentalist and an ignorant
extremist busybody. “All she wants is material for publicity,” one underling
told Albright. Some Park Service employees in Washington, D.C. even drafted
parodies of her pamphlets, with all-caps titles such as, “EVERYTHING IS BEING
DESTROYED—THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END.”
Pritchard found an October 1932 letter from Albright to
Audubon head Gilbert Pearson. In the letter, Albright admitted that
“experiments in the control of the [pelican] colony” had taken place, contrary
to Pearson’s recommendations. (Although Edge constantly berated Pearson for not
doing enough to defend predatory birds, he had done something.)Albright’s
letter defended the Park Service’s actions, presented them as less drastic than
they had actually been, and noted that the pelican had now received “complete
protection.” Pearson accepted the non-apology. Indeed, he embraced it. With
Albright’s permission, he forwarded the letter to 200 prominent conservationists—his
and Albright’s own form of pamphleteering.
With Albright’s letter publicizing Toll’s decision, pelicans
were not just protected, but protected publicly. Albright and Pearson openly
celebrated the role of a predatory bird in a national park, even when it
conflicted with recreational uses. This was surely due at least in part to the
ECC, whose pamphlets had turned pelicans from a scientific issue into a public cause.
“The controversy over the [Yellowstone] predator pelicans helped preserve the
white pelican in North America, shaped wildlife management policy in
Yellowstone, and… propelled Yellowstone and the National Park Service toward
redefining the purposes of the parks,” Pritchard writes.
Yet at the time, Albright denied that the new policy had
anything to do with the ECC. His letter to Pearson claimed that the Park
Service “has in no way been influenced by the Emergency Conservation
Committee.”
EDGE AS AN AMATEUR CONSERVATIONIST
In the 1981 book John Muir and his Legacy: The American
Conservation Movement, historian Stephen Fox argues that “the role of the
radical amateur was the driving force in conservation history.” Professional
conservationists and government agencies were important, Fox says, but were
hampered by bureaucratic inertia, political imperatives, and the need for money.
“Judged by such criteria as flexibility, vision, innovation, honesty, and zeal,
the amateurs played their parts more admirably: in the tradition of John Muir.”
Muir wandered the Sierra Nevada Mountains and wrote essays
and books. He lived like a bum until he married into a wealthy family. He’s
famous for founding the Sierra Club, but his role was more inspiration than
organization. Likewise were his political crusades, which were also unpaid. He
didn’t enjoy or even much understand the work, he mainly provided the vision and
poetic language for those who did. Even as a writer he was an outsider: lacking
in academic training or university affiliation, never on staff at a magazine, rooted
more in observing natural phenomena than reading other people’s books.
In Yellowstone, examples of amateur success include the
Lacey Act of 1894, which stopped hunting inside Yellowstone and established a
model for administering all national parks. It resulted from public outrage
against poachers spurred almost entirely by writer Emerson Hough and publisher
George Bird Grinnell. Similarly, Mission 66, a massive 1950s investment
in infrastructure-building, resulted from public outcry about substandard, overcrowded
conditions, spurred partly by Bernard DeVoto’s 1953 Harper’s article “Let's
Close the National Parks.” In both cases, amateurs produced rabble-rousing populism
with lasting effects. (Although Grinnell was associated with Audubon and the
Boone and Crockett Club, he never made any money at his conservation
activities. Fox writes that “In over forty years of campaigning he never lost
the amateur spirit.”)
“For Edge, as for many women of means, this hard-charging, vital movement was a first step into the public sphere. And she found that she had a taste for it.” – Michelle Nijhuis, author, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
Fox cites Edge as one of the 20th century’s best
such radical amateurs. He quotes young birder Maurice Brown, who later worked
for Edge at Hawk Mountain, hearing about her in the early 1930s: “Here was this
woman in New York City who was
Photo courtesy Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
doing things in conservation—very
militant, very strident, very abrasive, but she was doing things.
Getting things done.” By contrast, Audubon at the time, Fox writes, “seemed
frozen in memories of old battles.”
Edge’s amateur status empowered her. As the park historian Murphy
says, “She could be dedicated to wildlife, not an organization. And she could—if
you’ll excuse the really bad bird pun—ruffle some feathers.” However, this
attitude cost Edge dearly in terms of her relationships with traditional
conservationists.
For example, in addition to the scorn of Albright’s letter, consider
famed ecologist Aldo Leopold. In 1932, Leopold wrote Edge to complain about an
ECC pamphlet critiquing government wildlife policies, titled “It’s Alive! Kill
It!” He called the pamphlet “misleading and unfair,” especially a claim about
the Biological Survey’s “wholesale” poisoning of songbirds.
Edge responded: “If you do not call the destruction of
30,000 (or a number probably greatly exceeding 30,000) blackbirds ‘wholesale’
destruction, then the word wholesale must be entirely without meaning.”
She didn’t explicitly point out that Leopold, who had just left the Forest
Service and not yet joined the University of Wisconsin, was now totally
dependent for his income on ammunition makers, which funded his game surveys.
She simply implied that such relationships damaged one’s ability to speak out. “In
our opinion,” she said, “the failure of conservation is largely due to a want
of courage in telling the truth.”
IMPLICATIONS OF OUTSIDERISM
When Leopold, Bob Marshall, and other establishment figures
founded The Wilderness Society in 1935, they sent out invitations to
influential conservationists, pointedly excluding Edge. In a 1936 letter, she
called Marshall on it. He responded that they simply hadn’t thought of her. But
it seems clear they didn’t like her. In 1943, for example, Wilderness Society
employee Robert Sterling Yard told a colleague, “Rosalie Edge is a rich widow
who started a conservation organization … She
At the edge: Rosalie Edge at the entrance to her Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Photo courtesy Hawk Mountain
prints monthly circulars and
carries her hatreds into them.” (Yard was mistaken: the circulars were printed
irregularly, not monthly, and Edge was not yet widowed, merely estranged from
her husband.) Likewise, retired U.S. Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot
wrote a friend that nobody “goes off half cock with greater regularity than
Mrs. Edge.”
In other words, some saw the ECC as a fringe group. Murphy wonders
if there may be a similarity to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or
PETA, in the last few decades. “They were both extremist for their time and
used emotionally charged language,” she says. “When I read what she wrote, and
try to put myself in her time, I can see how her contemporaries might have
called her hysterical.”
Such a label was a sexist slur. Yet it was common in the
1930s, when hysteria was still an official medical diagnosis centered on
the idea that women could be overtaken by emotions, unable to control
themselves, while men were always clinical and logical. Today we know better;
as Murphy says. “Both genders can resort to bombastic, emotional language.”
In Yellowstone, examples of amateur conservation success include the Lacey Act of 1894, which stopped hunting inside Yellowstone and established a model for administering all national parks.
But Edge may have felt closed off from the clinical and
logical avenues toward creating change. Nijhuis, the Beloved Beasts author
whose impressive journalistic career has included editorial stints at The
Atlantic and High Country News, notes that Edge functioned as much
like an investigative journalist as an advocate. “She would hear things, follow
up on them, and then publish them in ways that were impossible for the establishment
to ignore,” Nijhuis says.
Edge often heard these things from scientists whose organizations
refused to let them speak publicly, for fear of angering funders. Because she
had such lowly status—as a woman, uneducated, without a salary or fundraising
network, and disliked in professional circles—she could say what professionals
dared not to.
And she was smart about it. Referring to Edge’s statements
at Audubon annual meetings, Nijhuis says she was both fearless and strategic.
“She was in the room with the people she wanted to embarrass—and the people
they didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of.” Though they weren’t literally
in the same room, this was clearly the strategy Edge brought to her Yellowstone
pelican fight: she embarrassed Horace Albright in front of people, such as
Audubon’s Gilbert Pearson, whose opinions Albright cared about.
WHY ISN'T ROSALIE EDGE KNOWN TODAY?
Edge was a minor celebrity in her day. She was profiled in The
New Yorker in 1948. The article called her “the only honest, unselfish,
indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation.” But today—outside of Hawk
Mountain and Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy, a fine 2009 biography by Dyana
Furmansky—she’s forgotten in many of the diverse places where she made an
impact.
Why? Nijhuis suggests some factors: “She was a woman, and
older when she became a conservation activist, and she never wrote a book.”
Edge drafted an autobiography, but it was nowhere near publishable when she
died in 1962—the year the book Silent Spring cemented the legacy of
another female conservation
The New Yorker profile of Edge, published in the April 17, 1948 edition. Photo courtesy The New Yorker
outsider, Rachel Carson. But perhaps the biggest
factor working against Edge was that she was such a maverick. “She wasn’t part
of a large organization,” Nijhuis says. As age slowed Edge in the late 1950s, the
ECC—which had never even developed bylaws—went extinct.
Edge had a huge impact on large organizations such as
Audubon and the Park Service. But because she’d always been at odds with them,
sometimes viciously, they were reluctant to acknowledge her. “They look back at
those interactions with red faces,” Murphy says. “Justifiably. But you can see
how they might prefer to highlight softer, gentler stories of their successes.”
Yellowstone might offer a particularly valuable venue in
which to reinvigorate Edge’s legacy. But it’s tricky. “Why are some people,
such as John Muir, well known to the public, while others, such as George Bird
Grinnell, aren’t?” Murphy wonders. Like Edge, Grinnell was an amateur outsider
with massive influence on policy in the park. But Murphy says that when she talks
to members of the public, they know Theodore Roosevelt better than his
influencer Grinnell.
The answer to the riddle of Rosalie Edge may be that
historical figures become well known when their quests become relevant. Roosevelt’s
Progressivism feels important amid today’s challenges; Muir’s nature-based
spirituality was little-known before 1960s Baby Boomers pursued the same
ideals.
As pelicans gained protection, ecology entered the
establishment. Thus, through the 20th century, it seemed Edge’s
militant outsider tactics didn’t need celebrating. “She increased the urgency,”
Murphy says. But given all the other people involved, and Albright’s canny
tactics, insiders were later able to claim that urgency hadn’t mattered much.
Almost a century later, the issues are different. Society is
different. Media platforms are different. But if and when an issue arises that
might benefit from an increased sense of urgency, Edge’s quest may yet gain
relevance. Her legacy stands ready to help.
Mountain Journalis a nonprofit, public-interest journalism organization dedicated to covering the wildlife and wild lands of Greater Yellowstone. We take pride in our work, yet to keep bold, independent journalism free, we need your support. Please donate here. Thank you.
About John Clayton
John Clayton writes the newsletter Natural Stories. His
books includeWonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, The Cowboy Girl, and Natural
Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. He has lived in Greater Yellowstone since 1990.
In 1879, Yellowstone
superintendent Philetus Norris made a fateful call that epitomized the park’s
relationship with Indigenous people—and thus with the world.
