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21 LEOPOLD'S VOICE ~ The Reach of Words Curt Meine In September 1936 AIdo Leopold and a friend, Ray Roark, journeyed from Wisconsin to the Mexican state of Chihuahua for a two-week bow hunt in the Sierra Madre Occidental. This was, for Leopold, a return to the semiarid mountain landscapes where as a young forester he first gained his professional footing as well as his ecological acumen. It was, however, his first experience of the Sierra Madre, and the comparison with forests on the American side of the border startled him. Accustomed as Leopold was to southwestern forests marked by intensive grazing, loss of grass cover, accelerated rates of erosion, and other effects of recently intensified human use, he was struck by the beauty and integrity of the Sierra Madre. The hills, "live oak-dotted" and "fat with side oats grama," retained their soils and their associated biological diversity. Clear streams ran through streamside bosques of willow, cottonwood , and sycamore. Predator and prey populations seemed to interact in a normal fashion. Fires occasionally swept through the mountains with "no ill effects," maintaining the forests in a more open state than in neighboring Arizona or New Mexico. For Leopold the Sierra Madre came "near to being the cream of creation."1 He would later write that in these hills he "first clearly realized ... that all my life I had seen only sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health."2 Shortly after his return to Wisconsin, Leopold composed a brief but spirited essay in which he celebrated the distinctive voice of the Mexican mountains-the thick-billed parrot. "As a proper ornithologist," he felt obliged to describe the voice of the parrots: loud, chattering, riotous, "full of the salty enthusiasm of high comedy."3 Leopold submitted the piece to a "proper" ornithological journal, The Condor, which immediately published it in its first issue of 1937. Leopold, at fifty years old, was already well established as a leader in the conservation world. He had been among the nation's first trained foresters and served for twenty highly productive years in the U.S. Forest Service. Beginning in the mid-1920s he had broken trail for the emerging profession of wildlife management. He was nationally recognized as 314 Leopold's Voice 315 a leading advocate for more effective wildlife conservation policies and for protection of the wild remnants of the nation's public domain. He gained an academic foothold when he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1933. Yet, in 1937, AIdo Leopold had not yet even begun to think about the collection of essays through which millions of readers would come to know him, A Sand County Almanac. Leopold had a strong reputation as one of the conservation movement 's most effective writers. His output ofprofessional essays, technical reports, policy statements, editorials, and position papers had begun in earnest in the late 1910s and had never slackened. In 1933 he published his classic textbook Game Management, which provided not only technical definition but a conceptual foundation for the new field. Leopold's paper trail had crossed all the realms of his interest, from the protection of wilderness to the ecology of grouse, from the sociology of hunters to the economics of farming. And there was hardly an item in his body of published work that did not contain its share of ironic images, playful commentaries, and unexpected turns of phrase. For all of his output, however, Leopold had not yet fully developed the voice that would characterize the writer of Sand County fame. Perhaps the "roistering flocks" of parrots inspired and liberated the proper scientist in Leopold. Perhaps Leopold had arrived at a secure stage in his career and felt free to perform, like the parrots, "a sort of morning drill in the high reaches of the dawn."4 Perhaps he had begun to sense a growing need to communicate not only with fellow professionals , but with the lay audience in whose hands, hearts, and minds he knew that conservation's success ultimately rested. In any event, with the publication of "The Thick-billed Parrot in Chihuahua"-later revised and published in the Almanac as "Guacamaja" ("as the natives euphoniously call the parrot")-Leopold went public with this new and still tentative voice.5 He would try it out later that same year when he published "Marshland Elegy," his powerful essay on cranes and wetlands, in American Forests.6 And by the end of...

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