Maurice Broun

Maurice Broun (1906–1979) was an American ornithologist, botanist, naturalist, conservationist, and author.

He was born in New York City to parents who immigrated from Romania. Both of his parents died from tuberculosis; his mother died when he was two weeks old, and his father died when he was two years old. Living in a New York City orphanage until he was about six years old, he was taken out by a Catholic family but the mother became ill and the foster father returned Maurice to the orphanage. When he was ten years old, a Jewish family became his foster family, and the family moved to Boston. At age fourteen he became interested in bird-watching in Boston Public Garden. He ran away from his foster family when he was fifteen years old and supported himself for the rest of his life. While attending Boston English High School, he rented a room and earned a living by menial jobs. While still a high school student, he published a booklet on birds seen in Boston Public Garden. For about two years he was a bellhop at Boston's Women's City Club. When he graduated from high school, a lady whom he met while bird-watching helped him find work as an assistant to Edward Howe Forbush and John Birchard May, who were completing Forbush's Birds of Massachusetts and other New England States (3 vols., 1923–1929). After three years of work on the third volume[3] of Forbush's book, Broun in 1929 went to work creating the Pleasant Valley Bird Sanctuary. There from 1929 to 1932 he cut six miles of trails and built a nature museum.[4]

One of the nation’s outstanding ornithologists with an enviable knowledge of botany, Mr. Broun was associated with the Pleasant Valley Sanctuary in Lenox, Mass., with the Austin Ornithological Research Station, Cape Cod, where he banded over 40,000 birds; and was nature supervisor for nine years at the Aven Mt. Club at Long Trail Lodge, Rutland, Vt., where he established the Trail Side Museum. He is also author of “Index to Northern Ferns,” which has become the outstanding guide to American ferns.[5]

While he was at Cape Cod, he met Irma Knowles Penniman (1908–1997),[6] an ornithologist and conservationist, and married her on 15 January 1934.[1] In 1934 the wealthy socialite, bird-watching enthusiast, and conservationist Rosalie Edge leased (with an option to buy) 1,400 acres (5.7 km²) to establish Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and hired Maurice and Irma Broun as game wardens to exclude hunters.[4] The land (in Eastern Pennsylvania) was purchased. With the exception of three years from 1942 to 1945 when he was a photographer with the Seabees in the South Pacific, Maurice Broun worked as a curator of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary from 1934 until his retirement in 1966.[1] Maurice and Irma worked as a husband and wife team at the Sanctuary until 1966 and then moved to a farm one ridge to the west of Hawk Mountain.[4] The couple continued work as naturalists and conservationists until he died of cancer in 1979. The couple had no children. After his death, Irma married Richard Kahn, and the Kahns moved to California.