While there, she and Fannie Hardy Eckstrom created a chapter of the Audubon Society to educate their classmates on ornithology and dissuade them from wearing hats with feathers.

Originally, she and Cooke were listed as co-authors, but Merriam successfully petitioned the Survey to name her the sole author due to the magnitude of her contributions.

[3] Caroline Merriam, meanwhile, was a graduate of Rutgers Female College and the daughter of Levi Hart, a county court judge and New York State Assembly member from Collinsville.

[6] Clinton was interested in glaciation as it related to his travels in the Yosemite Valley, and he engaged in a lengthy written correspondence with the naturalist John Muir over this topic.

[9] C. Hart, as he was known in his adult life, was also interested in the natural sciences, spending his adolescence studying birds and performing taxidermy on the animals he trapped on the family property.

[6][10] Their father's time in Congress gave them connections to the naturalist scene in Washington, D.C.: the elder Merriam arranged a meeting with Spencer Fullerton Baird, then the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to employ C. Hart as an ornithologist on a Yellowstone expedition in 1872.

[5] At the time of her enrollment, Smith lacked a science course, and so most of her class work was in writing, literature, geology, ethics, comparative religions, philosophy, music, and art.

[14] By September 1885, as she entered her final year at Smith, Merriam had an obsession with birds that began at the encouragement of family friend Ernest Thompson Seton.

[16] The following January, Merriam, who had befriended Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, was aghast to find that her friend wore bird feathers in her hat.

[18] In 1886, Merriam published a series of newspaper articles in New York, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., arguing for an end to bird feather hat decorations.

One month after Grinnell made this call, Merriam and Hardy, who by this point had stopped wearing feathered hats,[20] created one of the first local chapters of the Audubon Society at Smith College.

[21] About 75 students and faculty members attended the first meeting of the organization, and by March 17, 1886, the Smith College Audubon Society had adopted a constitution, officers, and a field committee.

[5] That year, Merriam published an article in Audubon Magazine about the aims of the club, which encouraged field study by asking students to observe "how the birds look, what they have to say, how they spend their time, what sort of houses they build, and what are their family secrets".

Shortly after Burrough's May 1886 visit, one-third of the student population at Smith had denounced the use of fashionable bird feathers and had joined the local Audubon Society.

[23] When Merriam left Smith in June 1886, the Audubon Society had become popular, while her classmates continued to communicate through class letters with major life updates.

[27] In 1891, she spent one month in Chicago at a summer school for working girls founded as a branch of Jane Addams's Hull House, teaching a class on birds.

[28][29] Both Merriam and her mother suffered from poor health, possibly caused by tuberculosis, which led the family to take vacations in regions with climates that were thought to ease illness, such as the West Coast, Lake Placid, New York City, and Florida.

In addition to easing her illness, the months-long stay in Southern California gave Merriam an interest in the Western United States and the avian life found there.

[34] This did not change until 1901, when Merriam, Mabel Osgood Wright, Harriet Mann Miller, and a few other women achieved the rank of "elective member".

[34] Merriam was good friends with Miller, who had encouraged her writing early in her career and who had taught her techniques to remain unnoticed by the birds she was observing.

[36] Her view of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that she encountered was regarded as complimentary for the time,[29] although her brother had heavily edited the manuscript.

[37] After leaving Utah, Merriam spent six months in California at Stanford University, which had been founded and was presided over by her brother's friend David Starr Jordan.

[29] Illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, then a student at Cornell University, A-Birding on a Bronco describes both Merriam's observations of the birds in California as well as her relationship with Canello, the white horse that she rode on her expeditions.

[40] She returned there in full after a final trip to the San Francisco Mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona, and promptly became involved in local scientific organizations.

[16] In 1898, Merriam received her first invitation to join her brother on a field expedition, serving as an assistant for a group that studied the natural life in Mount Shasta, California.

Wells Cooke had been in the midst of writing a survey on bird life in New Mexico before his unexpected death in 1916, and Nelson wanted Merriam to complete his work.

[58] Merriam was also a devoted aunt to her grand-nieces Floddie and Deirdre, helping the former to enroll in George Washington University when she could not attend Smith College.

[49][62] Two years later, she became the first woman to receive the Brewster Medal, awarded biennially to the writer of the most important ornithological work on birds of the Western Hemisphere.

[66] Science writer Paul Henry Oehser referred to Merriam as "one of the most literary ornithologists of her time", while Robert Welker classified her with Miller, Mabel Osgood Wright, and Neltje Blanchan as the four most important female authors of bird books in the nineteenth century.

[69] Additionally, one of Merriam's apprentices, Pat Jenks, discovered an unmapped volcanic formation in Mexico while surveying lands that were sacred to Indigenous peoples of the Americas.