Her last book of field notes—‘With the Birds in Maine’—was published in 1903, when she was seventy-two, after which time she was able to do very little active field work and her writing was confined mainly to children’s books.
In 1902 Mrs. Miller had visited her oldest son, Charles W. Miller, in California, and fascinated by the outdoor life and the birds and flowers of southern California, she would have returned to live, without delay, had it not been that her married daughter, Mrs. Smith, and her grandchildren lived in Brooklyn. In 1904, however, accompanied by her younger daughter, Mary Mann Miller, she did return to California, where her daughter built a cottage on the outskirts of Los Angeles on the edge of a bird-filled arroyo where rare fruits and flowers ran riot and the cottage—El Nido—became embowered in vines and trees.
From 1870-1915, as nearly as can be determined by her manuscript lists, Mrs. Miller published about seven hundred and eighty articles, one booklet on birds and twenty-four books—eleven of them on birds, her books being published mainly by the Houghton Mifflin Company and E. P. Dutton. When we stop to consider that her real work did not begin until she was fifty-four, after which four hundred and five of her articles and nineteen of her books were written, and moreover that during her later years, by remarkable self-conquest, she became a lecturer and devoted much of her time to lecturing on birds in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and other towns, we come to a realization of her tireless industry and her astonishing accomplishment.
When living in Brooklyn she was a member of some of the leading women’s clubs of New York and Brooklyn, giving her time to them with the earnest purpose that underlay all her work. In the midst of her busy life, it is good to recall as an example of her devotion to her friends, that for years Mrs. Miller gave up one day a week to visiting an old friend who had been crippled by an accident; and after she had gone to California took time to make for her a calendar of three hundred and sixty-five personally selected quotations from the best in literature.
Among Mrs. Miller’s pleasures during her later years in the East were the meetings of the Linnæan Society held in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the A. O. U. meetings which she attended in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, enjoying not only the papers of other workers, but the rare opportunity to meet those interested in her beloved work. In a letter written after one of the meetings she exclaimed—“You don’t know what a good time we have always. We had a real ‘love feast’ this time. Not only all the old standbys—Mr. Brewster, Mr. Sage, Dr. Allen, Dr. Merriam and the rest, but a lot of Audubonites and John Burroughs. I went over and stayed with Mrs. May Riley Smith and attended every session.” In this same letter she speaks of her promotion to the new class of membership and says, “It is a great pleasure to have honest work recognized, and encourages one to keep at it.”
When Mr. Brewster, in view of a discovery made by Mrs. Miller, wrote in ‘The Auk,’ regretting that one “gifted with rare powers of observation” should not record at least the more important of her discoveries in a scientific journal, Mrs. Miller replied in another note to ‘The Auk,’ confessing that she would not know what was a discovery; adding with the enthusiasm that vitalized her work—“to me everything is a discovery; each bird, on first sight, is a new creation; his manners and habits are a revelation, as fresh and as interesting to me as though they had never been observed before.” Explaining her choice of a literary rather than a scientific channel of expression, she gives the key to her nature work, one of the underlying principles of all her work—“my great desire is to bring into the lives of others the delights to be found in the study of Nature.”
Looking over the bookshelf where the names of Burroughs, Torrey, Miller, and Bolles call up each its own rare associations, I am reminded of a bit of advice that came long years ago from Mr. Burroughs’ kindly pen—“Put your bird in its landscape”—as this seems the secret of the richness and charm of this rare company of writers, for while beguiling us with the story of the bird, they have set it in its landscape, they have brought home to us “the river and sky,” they have enabled us to see Nature in its entirety.
Remembering this great boon which we owe Mrs. Miller, it seems rarely fitting that when her three score years and ten were accomplished, her last days should have been spent in the sunshine surrounded by the birds and flowers which brought her happiness in beautiful California.