Katharine (Clark) Harding Day

Katharine "Kitty" Harding Day (née Clark; February 10, 1891 – March 27, 1975) was an American ornithologist from Boston. She was one of the first American women to use bird banding to study the nesting behavior of native American birds. She conducted one of the first studies of the nesting biology of the black-throated blue warbler (Setophaga caerulescens).

Biography

Family and marriage Katharine Clark was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of the entomologist Benjamin Preston Clark (1860–1939) and Josephine Clark (1868–?).

At the age of 21, she married Richard Bruce Harding (1888–1945) at Saint Stephen's Episcopal church in Cohasset, Massachusetts, on June 8, 1912. They had two sons, Richard Jr. (1913) and Robert (1917).

After Richard's death, Katharine married her second husband, Freeman Day, on June 12, 1948, and relocated to Eugene, Oregon.

Ornithology Katharine and her husband set up a bird banding station in Cohasset in 1922.

From 1925 to 1932, she published 15 times under the name K. C. Harding, most of which were brief reports of recaptured banded birds in the Bulletin of the Northeastern Bird Banding Association (including its inaugural issue) and occasional notes on nesting behavior of various species.

In 1924, Katharine spent five weeks near Holderness, New Hampshire. The following year, she published a short paper called "Semi-colonization of Veeries", in which she reported a high density of nests and no aggression among male veeries,