Farida Anna Wiley

Farida Anna Wiley (born May 23, 1887 in Sidney , Ohio , † November 15, 1986 in Melbourne , Florida ), in publications also Farida A. Wiley , was an American naturalist , teacher and non-fiction author .

Life

Wiley grew up on a horse farm in Sidney, Ohio, and was fascinated by bird watching even as a child . At the age of twelve, she was regularly posting records of local nesting birds to the United States Biological Survey . After her father's death in 1919, she moved to Long Island , New York , and lived with her older sister Bessie and her husband, George Clyde Fisher , who was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and who founded the Hayden Planetarium in 1933. Through Fisher, Wiley also got a job at the New York Natural History Museum, where she taught part-time botany to blind students . From 1923 to 1955 she was initially an assistant in the photo archive and then an employee, teacher and deputy chairwoman of the public relations office. In 1938 she began her bird excursions and nature hikes for museum visitors and bird watchers in Central Park , which she continued until she was 94 in 1981 and made them known far beyond the borders of New York. Wiley has also taught at Pennsylvania State College , Audubon Camp in Maine, and a branch of New York University on Long Island.

Wiley has published six books including Ferns of the Camp Wigwam Region (1928), The Ferns of the Northeastern United States (1936), John Burroughs' America: Selections from the Writings of the Naturalist (1951), The Story of the Landscape (1952 , with Henry K. Svenson ), Ernest Thompson Seton's America: Selections from the Writings of the Artist-Naturalist (1954) and Theodore Roosevelt's America Selections from the Writings of the Oyster Bay Naturalist (1955, with illustrations by Ugo Mochi ), to the Ethel Roosevelt Derby, Roosevelt's youngest daughter, wrote the foreword.

In 1973, Wiley received the American Museum of Natural History's silver medal for her outstanding work as a teacher and naturalist.

literature

• Keir Brooks Sterling, Richard P. Harmond, George A. Cevasco, Lorne Foster Hammond: Biographical Dictionary of American and Canadian Naturalists and Environmentalists. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, London 2006, pp. 625-626. ISBN 978-0-313-23047-9
• Farida A (nna) Wiley. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 1998. Gale In Context: Biography, accessed October 20, 2019.

Web links

• Wolfgang Saxon: Farida A. Wiley is dead at 99; Naturalist and Bird Watcher In: The New York Times , November 18, 1986, accessed October 20, 2019.
• Chip Brown: Miss Wiley - Grand Birder of Central Park In: The Washington Post , December 26, 1986, accessed October 20, 2019.
• Literature by and about Farida Anna Wiley in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Farida Anna Wiley at the IPNI