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Ada Govan, Rachel Carson and the
Wonder of Birds

A revolution in the way we perceive and respond to today’s world was started by two women, one of whom is now enshrined on the Women’s Monument on the Lexington green where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Ada Govan, a close friend of Rachel Carson and author of Wings at My Window was a noted bird bander and expert who created the 12-acre Woodland Bird Sanctuary around her home after her successful fight to save the woods from developers. Crippled by the deaths of her children and depression, Govan found meaning and hope through developing a sense of wonder for the life around her. Her book, Wings at My Window (1940) became a best-seller, helped to expand the conservation movement, and deeply affected the work and writing of Rachel Carson.

Govan is represented on the monument along with the likes of Cate Chester and her mother, an enslaved woman whose child, Cate, was wrenched from her as she was sold into slavery. Cate ultimately managed to negotiate her own emancipation and was finally paid for the spinning work she had being doing for years. The themes of the preciousness of children, of painful loss, and of persistence even in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles pervade the Women’s Monument, as do the need to care for the Earth, and the joy and strength one gains from nature.

The grief of separation from children was dreadfully familiar to Ada Govan. Three of her four children died in infancy and her ten-year old son nearly died from prolonged illness. In an attempt to restore her mental health, she and her husband sought refuge and restoration in nature and in a house they built in the Lexington woods. But a serious fall there left Govan deeply depressed, in pain, and unable to leave the house. But while snowbound in a blizzard, she had a kind of epiphany. Seeing a chickadee barely hanging on to her windowsill, Govan gave it seeds. Soon other birds arrived through the snow and Ada Govan, the amateur ornithologist, bird-bander and nature writer was born.

Photo: Courtesy of Lexington Historical Society

She sought out popular bird books of the day, including some that had been likely read by Rachel Carson and her mother. Then, under an assumed name, Govan began to write a regular column about birds in Nature magazine, banded large numbers of birds, especially Evening Grosbeaks, and kept careful records of their comings and goings that proved surprisingly useful to ornithologists. Now immersed in caring for birds, and finding an outlet through writing, Govan’s psychology, strength and mobility rebounded. She was able to fight off developers who wanted to destroy and build on the woods around her home, founded the Woodland Bird Sanctuary (now named in her honor) and in 1940 published the best-selling story of her trials and triumphs, Wings at My Window.

Enter Rachel Carson. In 1945, Carson had yet to reach best-seller status with The Sea Around Us (1951). Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, published in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, had sold a mere 2,000 copies and fallen out of print. Employed at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson took to free-lancing magazine articles to supplement her income. Failing to interest the Saturday Evening Post with a piece about terns, Carson reframed it with a human interest angle as “Bird Banding Is Their Hobby” and sold it to Holiday magazine for $500. In writing it, Rachel Carson corresponded with Ada Govan about her bird banding, found common interests that led to deep friendship, and finally to several visits in 1946 to Govan at her house and sanctuary in Lexington.

Carson was especially taken with Govan’s twelfth chapter in Wings at My Window, “Children Into Bird Lovers.” It urges parents to accompany and introduce their children to nature and birds in order to develop their love of other creatures and to protect them.

If parents will explain the wonder tale of the birds’ migration to their children, instinctively they will want to help the birds, not kill them…Surely the bravery of these feathered voyager will light a glow in their hearts. — Ada Govan

Govan’s ideas helped inspire Carson to write the article, “Help Your Child to Wonder” for the July, 1956 Woman’s Home Companion. It featured a photo of young boys in nature, including Carson’s grandnephew, Roger Christie, whom she adopted when his mother, Marjorie Christie, Rachel’s niece, died at 31.

Like Cate Chester, Ada Govan and other women forged into the Lexington Women’s Monument who overcame tragedy, Rachel Carson had suffered illness and loss throughout her life. Among others, Carson saw the deaths of her sister, her niece, her mother, and battled with metastatic breast cancer, even while writing Silent Spring and caring for her orphaned stepchild, Roger Christie. Yet she wrote:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement…If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder…an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. — Rachel Carson

It is how Rachel Carson, Ada Govan, and so many of the women of Lexington persisted through suffering and often sought solace in the nature around them. With a sense of wonder that gave them hope, renewal, and strength, they were able to take action.