Smith College. About 75 students and faculty members attended the first meeting of the organization, and by March 17, 1886, the Smith College Audubon Society had adopted a constitution, officers, and a field committee. That year, Merriam published an article in Audubon Magazine about the aims of the club, which encouraged field study by asking students to observe "how the birds look, what they have to say, how they spend their time, what sort of houses they build, and what are their family secrets". Merriam was of the belief that rather than outright telling her classmates to stop wearing feathered hats, it was more effective to take them on nature walks, which would cause them to form an attachment to local wildlife and stop the practice of their own accord. As part of this process, she recruited John Burroughs to come to campus and take the students on a nature walk. Shortly after Burrough's May 1886 visit, one-third of the student population at Smith had denounced the use of fashionable bird feathers and had joined the local Audubon Society. Burroughs, meanwhile, returned to campus every year to lead a bird walk, even after Merriam had left Smith. When Merriam left Smith in June 1886, the Audubon Society had become popular, while her classmates continued to communicate through class letters with major life updates. As a special student, Merriam did not earn a degree after her four years of college, but the institution eventually presented her with a bachelor's degree in 1921, when she was 58 years old. Merriam's movement to protect birds from the millinery industry progressed after she left Smith: the Lacey Act of 1900 prohibited the trade of illegally acquired wildlife, while the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made the protection of migratory birds a federal law. Nature writing and activism Early writing and travels After leaving Smith in 1886, Merriam, still unmarried, was caught between her desires to advance her nature writing and to contribute to the world socially. Her first articles on bird lore in Audubon Magazine appeared in 1887, and when she was not writing, Merriam joined her mother's volunteer work at social action clubs for working women and girls. In 1891, she spent one month in Chicago at a summer school for working girls founded as a branch of Jane Addams's Hull House, teaching a class on birds. The following summer, she worked