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Scugog Memorial Public Library, 231 Water Street, Port Perry
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Community Events

Event Details:

June 28, 2022 @ 7:00p.m. – Merilyn Simonds speaks about Louise de Kiriline Lawrence (Canada’s Rachel Carson), Port Perry Library

Author Merilyn Simonds will introduce us to amateur ornithologist and nature writer Louise de Kiriline Lawrence. Through the mid 1900s,  de Kiriline Lawrence tracked the sharp decline in warblers and flycatchers in northern Ontario and linked it to the roadside spraying of toxic chemicals—a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sounded the same alarm. Louise emigrated to Canada in 1926, setting up a Red Cross Outpost in Bonfield, Ontario, where she later became nurse-in-charge of the Dionne Quintuplets. Disturbed by the media circus around the infants, she built a log cabin on the Mattawa River and spent the next 50 years studying birdlife and writing almost a hundred articles and six books about species that were diminishing before her eyes.

Merilyn Simonds is the author of 18 books, including the non-fiction classic The Convict Lover, Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, Refuge and most recently, Women Watching. She is the founder and first artistic director of the Kingston Writers Fest. 

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