Birding and Reading

I was a lucky child with three grandmothers who owned houses overlooking the sea. Two on the east coast, one on the west. We whiled away the hours reading and watching the birds. I preferred the eastern view, watching the sun and the moon rise out of the ocean. The birds start singing early and to this day, I am an early riser

As luck would have it, I spent most of my childhood summers with the grandmother who owned a cottage on Nantucket. There I encountered two sisters in law – Edith and Barbara Andrews. The former was an ornithologist who willingly took any novice under her wing. The latter was the librarian at The Atheneum.

Every year, our first trip to town would be for a blue cardboard library card with our name neatly printed on it. Mrs. Andrews greeted us as if we were long lost relatives and thoughtfully reviewed our summer reading lists and helped us figure out how to find the titles we were looking for in the card catalogue and then on the shelf. We dutifully copied down the Dewey Decimal numbers with golf pencils on little slips of paper and then headed into the stacks with our “Clue” as though it were a scavenger hunt. We returned weekly to exchange titles.

A few years later I would meet another Mrs. Andrews, Edith, at The Mariah Mitchell Association where she was the resident ornithologist. She had compiled a book, The Birds of Nantucket and spent decades organizing the island’s birding club – where all were welcome . She also spent countless hours cataloging sightings, banding birds and preserving bird specimens for the natural history museum. If you found a dead bird on the beach, you let Edith know, in case she wanted it for the collection.

The Andrews women taught me that it was OK to be curious and ask questions and I headed down many rabbit holes under their tutelage. They gave me lifelong gifts of birding and reading which I treasure every day. They mentored countless island youth and visitors for generations What luck to have been in the right place at the right time:)

Thank you Edith and Barbara