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By Root 2990 0

manifesto of 1962, Edge, from her Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in eastern Pennsylvania—the first rehabilitation center for birds of prey—warned against the chemical companies, gun manufacturers, and logging conglomerates that were trying to exterminate these magnificent creatures. Edge was a fearless activist, a feisty, independent spirit who couldn’t accept the idea of America without eagles, hawks, and owls. A New York socialite reared with patrician values, Edge defended wildlife by writing stinging articles and giving lectures and speeches. When Roosevelt, Burroughs, and Muir died and the conservationist movement was losing its spirit, Edge came to the fore. In a fourteen-page profile, the New Yorker accurately described her as somehow resembling both Queen Mary and an excited pointer on the hunt (adding that her crusade to rehabilitate eagles was “widespread and monumental”).21

What concerned Edge in general, however, was the degradation of nature by industry. Without her activism, it’s doubtful that Congress would have created Sequoia–Kings Canyon National Park in California in 1940, or that developers would have been prevented from diverting Wyoming’s Yellowstone Falls in Yellowstone National Park. Stoop-shouldered, with a face remarkably like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, Edge refused to be complacent. She contended that huge companies and manufacturers were interested only in dollars. They weren’t to be trusted when it came to protecting nature. In the West they had to be tightly regulated by the U.S. Department of the Interior, but it was often in cahoots with the companies to which it was leasing land. Teapot Dome, Edge believed, was merely the tip of the iceberg with regard to corruption occurring between the U.S. federal government and private corporations.

Edge also believed that conservation began at home, and she led a crusade to ban the shooting of hawks and eagles in the Kittatinny Ridge of Pennsylvania. Every year these birds migrated from Canada to roost along fish-rich streams in Schuylkill County. She used the word “sanctuary” to connote that protecting birds of prey had a religious or missionary element. Edge was by 1920 the new William Temple Hornaday, an indomitable protector of species. She frequently claimed that killing bald eagles was as sacrilegious as slashing Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware would be. Every fall, Edge was disgusted by the annual sparbenbarich, a local term (derived from German) for a massacre of thousands of hawks. The unethical hunters, with dozens of dead hawks strewn about them, would proudly smile for photographers.

When Edge was in Paris, she received a provocative pamphlet written by Willard Van Name, W. Dewitt Miller, and Davis Quinn: “A Crisis in Conservation: Serious Danger of Extinction of Many North American Birds.” According to these authors, eagles, hawks, and owls were being systematically wiped out in the United States. Edge was repelled: Wasn’t the bald eagle our national emblem? Didn’t owls help farmers by eating small rodents? Having fought for women’s suffrage with Carrie Chapman Catt at her side, Edge knew something about grassroots activism and about winning battles. Dissatisfied with the Audubon Society, which was sitting on the sidelines, and critical of its active founder Gilbert Pearson, who seemed rather lackadaisical about protecting eagle, hawk, and owl populations and habitats, Edge founded the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC). There were about 300 species of raptors in the world—including hawks, eagles, and falcons—and the EEC wanted them protected.22

Edge marshaled a number of leading scientists to defend wildlife. She also sued the Audubon Society for misrepresenting itself as protecting birds. She believed that the society had become compromised by trophy hunters, timber barons, the pesticide industry, and government bureaucrats on the take. A lawyer for the Audubon Society tried to humiliate Edge by calling her “a common scold.” Years later, recalling how she had first learned of the insult, Edge scoffed, “Fancy how I