Who She Was
Rosalie Edge was a New York socialite and women's suffrage activist who became one of the twentieth century's most unlikely and effective conservationists. In the early 1930s, she learned that hunters were shooting migrating hawks by the hundreds for sport each fall along a ridge in Pennsylvania, and that the leading conservation organization of the time was doing little to protect birds of prey. Rather than accept that, she leased 1,400 acres on the ridge in 1934, hired a warden named Maurice Broun and his wife Irma to stop the shooting, later bought the land outright, and founded Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the world's first refuge for birds of prey. Through her Emergency Conservation Committee, she also publicly challenged the National Association of Audubon Societies for failing to protect raptors and for its ties to hunting interests, battles that made her plenty of enemies in the conservation establishment of her era. Hawk Mountain is still an active raptor research and conservation site today, more than ninety years later.
Why She Matters
Edge proved that conservation land management didn't have to wait for permission from the institutions of her time, and that a single person willing to lease, buy, and personally protect land could accomplish what large organizations refused to even attempt. Her fight to protect hawks challenged a popular assumption that only "useful" or beautiful animals deserved protection, helping push the conservation movement toward protecting predators and misunderstood species. She did this work as a woman in a field run almost entirely by men, and she collected plenty of critics along the way. Hawk Mountain still counts and protects raptors today, proof that her approach worked. Her career shows that conservation land management sometimes means protecting a place precisely because nobody else believes it is worth protecting.
