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In any case, I got interested and sent her -- She started a new organization called the Emergency Conservation Committee. Notice it didn't have the word environment. It was Conservation Committee, which was a small but activist organization founded specifically to protect birds of prey and to repeal the widespread bounty system that was slaughtering birds of prey everywhere, especially in Pennsylvania. I don't remember the exact details, but I know that the basic point was that she was a much more militant conservationist than the leadership of the Audubon Society was at that time. That, of course, changed later on.

My only point in bringing this up is that this was in the '30s and I was interested enough in this problem to send Mrs. Edge very small contributions, $15 - $20 maybe, maybe even less, I don't know, to her committee, which I had been reading about. Her particular thing for which she became a really important figure in the early American conservation movement - - although not many people know her name -- was to try to prevent the absolute slaughter of raptors, of hawks, as they migrated southward over an area in Pennsylvania, in Eastern Pennsylvania, where there was a combination of topographic and weather conditions so that the winds moving South would flow over a rise in the ground, which is called Hawk Mountain now, in Eastern Pennsylvania. And the farmers would line up there and have a marvelous vantage point to shoot down the hawks, all these raptors. In those days the state of Pennsylvania gave them a bounty because the hawks were accused of decimating the chicken population.

In any case, Mrs. Edge led a campaign which in its first operation was really physically dangerous because there was so much resentment by the local farmers and local people,