Gladys Black

Gladys Bowery Black (1909 to 1998) was an American ornithologist, conservationist and writer known as Iowa's Bird Lady. Raised on a farm near Pleasantville, Iowa, where her mother introduced her to birding, she trained as a nurse and took a degree in public health nursing. In Georgia she began working with the ornithology professor David Ware Johnston of Mercer University and set up a local bird-banding program, and after moving back to Pleasantville in 1956 she joined the Iowa Ornithologists' Union. Although she had no formal training in ornithology, she spent more than three decades identifying bird species in Iowa, keeping checklists and educating the public, and from 1969 to 1987 she wrote a weekly birding column. She was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1985.