1/3/2024 0 Comments Larson late bird![]() Many of Peterson’s rare bird sightings happened at a little-known lake straddling the South Dakota border near tiny Marietta, Minn. “While she’s a lovely lady, to prove that she was right, she’d squeeze until it died and send it to him,” Larson said. So Peterson purchased a sparrow trap, captured a male and female towhee and sent them to Roberts, who was compiling his book, “The Birds of Minnesota.” Her findings - a first in Minnesota - drew skepticism from Roberts at the Natural History Museum in Minneapolis. During the Dust Bowl days of 1934, she identified Arctic towhees, which she figured grew disoriented in a dust cloud. “How many times has the door of her friendly white house opened to the timid knock of a freckle-nosed child carrying an injured Robin or the report of a strange warbler that evaded identification?” “The outgoing warmth of her personality and interest in people was a two-way charm - opening the eyes of the uninitiated to the wonders of nature as revealed through an interest in birding,” Larson wrote in 1960. Larson, a childhood neighbor of the Petersons, grew into a birding luminary after Mae gave him his first bird book. Thus began her interest in birds,” according to Goodman Larson’s loving memorial, written when Mae died, in a 1960 issue of the Flicker - the newsletter of the Minnesota Ornithologists Union. “ ‘Charlie’ Peterson, as everyone knew him in Madison, said that his wife had just inherited some bird books and that maybe she could help him. They were working on a diorama depicting prairie habitat and asked if anyone knew about nesting sites of western Minnesota prairie birds. Thomas Roberts, the curator of the University of Minnesota’s Museum of Natural History, stopped by the Madison drugstore with a pair of associates. The fateful meeting that sparked Mae’s birding passion happened there in 1924, when she was raising two sons in her late 40s.ĭr. Peterson’s Drug Store would serve as an anchor in Madison’s business district until Charlie died in 1938. Mixing more than compounds, she married her pharmacy co-worker, Charlie Peterson, in 1905 and they purchased a drugstore 30 miles away in Madison, Minn. She studied nursing, then shifted gears - graduating with a pharmacy degree from the University of Minnesota and landing a job at a drugstore in Ortonville on the South Dakota border in the early 1900s. The daughter of a carpenter and his Scottish bride, she was born in Rochester in 1876 and graduated from high school there in 1893. Mae Nisbit Peterson banded more than 15,000 birds from 120 species in a 27-year span - logging 286 different birds on her so-called life list. A happenstance meeting at a western Minnesota pharmacy launched the career of one of Minnesota’s most prolific birding pioneers.
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