A stuffed female heath hen sits on display at the Boston Museum of Science. Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) commemorated Earth Day this year, with the presentation of a lecture by historian and author Christie Lowrance.

According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife& Wildlife Service national historian Mark Madison, the lecture was part of the monthly NCTC Conservation Lecture Series, which has been educating the public for over a quarter-of-a-century.

“We are celebrating our 26th year of doing this lecture series,” Madison said.

Madison, who is one of the series coordinators, said Lowrance was asked to give the Earth Day lecture, because of her experience as a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor and her research on the heath hen, which she published last year in her children’s book, “The Last Heath Hen: An Extinction Story.” She also published a biography, “Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess,” in 2013.

“She’s an assiduous researcher, a wonderful writer and a good colleague,” Madison said.

Lowrance expressed her delight to be presenting her lecture on Earth Day.

“What a better day for everyone to be together and to be talking about two books that are related to the conservation that has been extremely important to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service,” Lowrance said. “I especially want to thank Mark Madison, who has been instrumental, actually, in both of these books.”

She noted that Madison wrote the forward for her biography and provided great support to her, when she was writing her children’s book.

“His encouragement for writing the children’s book has been steady and constant,” Lowrance said. “He contributed a very powerful statement about this particular book, and that is, that ‘In North American extinction history, the story of the heath hen presents perhaps the only documented instance of an individual in the wild.'”

Although her second book was written for children, Lowrance thoroughly researched its subject matter. She drew on first-person accounts by naturalist Thornton Burgess and ornithologist Alfred Gross, as well as archival video film footage restored by Bowdoin College and the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, to write her book.

“We are lucky to have some evidence of this bird,” Lowrance said, mentioning the film footage had been found in an attic. “Tonight, I’ll be telling you actually two stories. One will be about a bird and the story of its extinction in 1933. The other will be a story of a man, Thornton Burgess, who had the extraordinary experience of holding the last heath hen — the last one of its kind. I’m also going to talk about the role of Thornton Burgess and the, I think, unusual and perhaps little understood role of children’s literature and Thornton Burgess in American conservation.”

The first conservation legislation in the U.S. was made for the heath hen in 1831, when the Massachusetts legislature passed a law protecting the bird. Unfortunately, the legislation was not enough to save the heath hen and by 1839 it could be found nowhere in Massachusetts, outside of Martha’s Vineyard. The heath hen was reported extinct in Long Island in 1836 and in New Jersey in 1876.

The factors that led to the bird’s extinction included: loss of habitat, fire, disease, poaching, hunting, domestic cats and fashion trends, according to Lowrance.

Sharing this history with children, as well as adults, is paramount to the survival of other native animals in the U.S. Burgess himself demonstrated this belief, according to Lowrance, through his years of work writing children’s books about animals, such as “The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad” and “Peter Cottontail.”

“One of the reasons I’m here and thrilled to be here, is the pure story of conservation, the importance of conservation and bringing the message of conservation to children,” Lowrance said. “There was a savviness about Thornton Burgess’ approach. His books were describing an ecosystem and how they were interacting and the stresses that were upon these creatures, which were all there for children to learn from. His idea of going to a young audience with the science of environmental conservation, was something that resonated with me.”