Among the most significant ornithological studies of the 1920s was the work of a child psychologist, Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974), who had a master's degree in psychology and wrote articles on that subject at the same time she was studying birds. Nice's consuming interest was the observation of behavior, whether in her five daughters (the "research subjects"of her writings on psychology) or birds. By 1920 Nice had decided she preferred bird-watching to people-watching and published the first of thirty-five articles that led to The Birds of Oklahoma (1924), the first complete study of that subject, which she wrote with her husband, Leonard Blaine Nice, head of the physiology department at the University of Oklahoma. Margaret Nice's early bird studies are largely descriptive, but by the mid 1920s, she had begun careful observations of their behavior, inspired by watching captive wild birds that she kept as...