At an AOU meeting in 1927 she was greeted as "Mrs Mourning Dove Nice" by Florence Merriam Bailey.[9] Here she carried out a study of song sparrows that established her as one of the leading ornithologists in the world, recording the behavior of individual birds over a long period of time. She studied two banded pairs of birds, named Uno and 4M,[10] initially and later 69 banded pairs.