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20 A Portent of aDifferent Future (I945-I947) THE WEEKS following V-J Day brought forth what Leopold described as "the largest and best batch of graduate students I have ever seen." Returning soldiers wasted no time in beating a path to the doorstep of the Department of Wildlife Management. Leopold, McCabe , and Virginia Kiesel, the new department secretary, hustled to make their own peacetime transition a smooth one.! The scene repeated itself in universities and government agencies across the country. A distinctly new generation of wildlifers was coming into the profession. Many were simply resuming war-interrupted plans. Many others had picked up an interest in wildlife in the course of their global travels. Still others, war-weary and disillusioned, saw it as an alternative to the disoriented state of human affairs. Leopold did his best to cope with the surge of applicants. He admitted half a dozen new students immediately; that was as many as he could effectively handle. In a search for assistants, he approached several of his former students-Art Hawkins, Irv Buss, Frederick Hamerstrom. They too were caught up in the postwar rush. The demand would not soon diminish : Leopold had nineteen students on line, with another twenty-five inquiring . Passage of the GI Bill ensured that the number of new applicants would remain high. Leopold also tried to bring Albert Hochbaum back to the university, but Hochbaum had his hands full with the work at Delta. Over the summer , he had become embroiled in a dispute with Ducks Unlimited over the status of waterfowl populations. DU, the most influential private waterfowl conservation group in the country, was an outgrowth of the old More Game Birds group, with the important difference that it was more heavily committed to habitat acquisition and preservation than its precursor. Previously , the Delta station and DU had worked together on a number of 474 A Portent of a Different Future projects (Leopold had strongly encouraged this cooperation), but after a summer tour of Manitoba's marshlands, including DU's field stations, Hochbaum became convinced that it was "primarily a money-making outfit and is fundamentally dishonest."2 His quarrel was not with DU's membership or field men, but with its leadership and, above all, its publicity force. He accused them ofdishonest motives, fraudulent reports, and, most damning, flagrant exaggeration of duck breeding and population figures. These misstatements, Hochbaum feared, were being used to convince American wildfowlers that there was a limitless supply of ducks on the wing. Hochbaum wrote one letter after another to Leopold substantiating his claims. Then, in September, Hochbaum lost his temper during a meeting with the head of Ducks Unlimited-Canada in Winnipeg. Leopold had no official obligation to enter the fray, but his personal ties inevitably drew him into it. Far from the scene, he was unwilling to break with the DU leadership, and cautioned Hochbaum to show restraint -which only infuriated Albert. Their relationship, though, had grown beyond differences of opinion. Leopold wrote to him, "One of the premises of our friendship is that we are free to speak freely, and on past occasions you have done so ... [and] in the long run I have thanked you for speaking your mind. Whether, in the present situation, I am right or wrong is beside the point. Very possibly I am wrong."3 The dispute was a fundamental one, and it would admit of no quick or easy solution. In the meantime, horn-locking between Hochbaum and the Ducks Unlimited leadership would intensify as duck populations plummeted after the 1945 breeding season. Students filtered back to Madison all autumn long. Lyle Sowls returned in October after four years in the Navy. "He is the same gentle humorous generous Lyle as before," Leopold wrote, "but of course a bit saddened by what he has seen, as any person of his sort must be."4 Lyle was anxious to return to his wildlife work and to his studies of the Franklin's ground squirrel at Delta. A few days after Sowls returned, on October 25, he and one of Leopold 's new students, Bob Ellarson, took the Professor out on a pheasant hunt in the rolling ridges and draws of Green County. Each of them shot one cock pheasant. Aldo mistakenly shot a hen as well; hens were not legal game. A cock he had flushed sought cover in a field of standing corn. They raised a bird, but it was a hen that emerged instead. Before...

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