Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch: The Lives of Naturalists Frederick and Francis Hamerstrom

6 Enter Leopold and the Chickens

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams Aldo Leopold, whose profound effect on the practices of conservation and game management continues to this day, believed in a “new social concept toward which conservation is groping.”1 Ethics, he declared, must guide our dealings with nature—an idea that was new to most Americans of the time and accepted by even fewer. To most citizens, conservation meant damage control, then beginning to be provided by the 840,000 acres in twenty-two new game refuges across the nation.2 Leopold, a graduate of Yale forest school, worked first for the forest service in New Mexico. There he began to move ahead of the attitudes of his time. In the 1920s he saw planting crews ruin a rare open patch of clover—ideal food for deer and partridge—by planting seedling pines over it and became increasingly aware of the importance of predation to the health of the environment.3 After a brief assignment to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, he undertook a survey of the north central states in 1930 for the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute. He recognized the need for a new breed of managers who would devote themselves to researchbased game management. To educate them he proposed that the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) support a new course of study at the University of Wisconsin. The foundation agreed and in 1933 funded a five-year budget of $8,000 a year, which paid Leopold’s salary and modest program expenses. Leopold was seen as a somewhat unorthodox academic in an 88 6 Enter Leopold and the Chickens unproven profession. Although he “lacked the requisite Ph.D.,”4 he was appointed by the foresighted Harry L. Russell, dean of the College of Agriculture, to head the new entity and serve as its sole faculty member . Formal designation of a department had to wait until 1939. In the early years, Leopold was housed in an office in the basement of the Soils Building. Each year Leopold accepted only five students who “could and would think.”5 He wanted independent people with considerable field experience who would not only be excited about doing research but remain open to new ideas. Both Hamerstroms met the specifications that seemed to have been tailor-made for them. They joined the program in 1937, Hammy as a Ph.D. candidate and Fran, to her husband’s deep satisfaction, for the master’s degree. They chose to live in an old farmhouse on a ninety-acre farm close to Madison. It needed repairs but was rent free; they settled in. There in that gently rolling Dane County countryside they missed the tranquil moonlit nights of Necedah, where the sound of neighbor Jack Becker’s baritone had floated into their bedroom. “Do you miss our neighbors, Hammy?” she asked him. “I do,” he replied. “But I don’t miss the tractor accompaniment to his singing while the poor devil plowed half the night after working in town all day!” But in fact, they reveled in the stimulation of a university community and the congeniality of their new situation. Chicago offered visits with the Darrows and meetings of the American Ornithological Union. They went dancing with their friends and made new acquaintances, one of whom was Roger Tory Petersen.6 Leopold soon gave Hammy the title “Assistant in Game Management ” and charged him with handling correspondence for the cooperative bird-banding group he had created. This involved letters to and from men in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, North Dakota, Minnesota , and Illinois. Results were not remarkable—Hammy received many answers to his requests for reports that said no banding had been done, or that birds did not respond to bait in mild winters, or that funds had not been provided—but his experience and the resulting network gave him a foundation for future work. On a trip to New Orleans in the early 1940s, the Hamerstroms met the director of research for the Louisiana Conservation Department. Enter Leopold and the Chickens 89 He entertained them in “the oldest apartment building in America” on the Place d’Armes, and he took them to the delta at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Hammy described that experience in a jubilant letter to his parents. At that time, several of the then unpopulated arms...