Mass Audubon

Book excerpt: Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall might be surprised to see what their simple discussion over tea in Boston's Back Bay in 1896 has led to more than one hundred years later. Concerned about the widespread killing of birds for use in the millinery trade, the ladies asked other society women not to wear dead birds on their hats and to join the Massachusetts Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds. Today, sixty-eight thousand households across the state support the protection of all native Massachusetts wildlife on more than thirty thousand acres of sanctuaries from Wellfleet Bay on Cape Cod to Pleasant Valley in Lenox. Mass Audubon carries the reader around the state to meet the farmers, entrepreneurs, and donors who owned, worked, and loved the land before it passed into the protective embrace of this conservation organization.