February 8, 1973

Ruth Harris Thomas, a highly regarded amateur ornithologist who wrote a column on birding for forty years, died at the age of seventy-two. Moving to Little Rock in 1923 to become a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette, Thomas soon gave up her reporting career after her marriage to the paper’s associate editor, Stanley Powers Rowland Thomas. In 1930, Ruth took over her husband’s assigned column on country life, “The Country Diarist.” As her interest in amateur ornithology grew, she went on to publish nine scientific papers on birds, leading to her best-known work Crip, Come Home: The Story of a Bird Who Came to Stay.