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2 Sowing the Seeds of the Leopold Memorial Reserve Idea 29 After his 1935 purchase of Jacob Alexander’s abandoned farm, Aldo Leopold and his family quickly became attached to this forlorn patch of land and recognized its potential for renewal. e family later used the term “shack” to affectionately describe the property’s only remaining building at the time they acquired the land. Now designated a National Historic Landmark, the simple structure had been the Alexanders ’ chicken coop. Aldo and his wife Estella converted the coop into lodging (and later expanded it slightly with a 10-by-15-foot “west wing addition ”) for their family of five children, who ranged in age from eight to twenty-two at the time of its purchase. Similar to most other dwellings in the area, it lacked plumbing and electricity. Nevertheless, the Leopold children were so fond of the shack and surrounding land that they were willing to trade special occasions such as the high school prom for the family’s weekend trips there.1 What helped form the future Leopold Memorial Reserve was not just the commitment of one family, though. Aldo Leopold understood as well as anyone in the conservation field the need for cooperation among landowners in making habitat improvements on a larger scale. is was based on his recent experience as an extension scientist at the University of Wisconsin—a land-grant university—and with setting up cooperative projects at Riley, Coon Valley, and elsewhere. His earlier work as a forester in the newly incorporated states of Arizona and New Mexico, in which he mediated disputes between the US Forest Service and ranchers who were using federal grazing lands, also strongly influenced his conservation philosophy .2 His wide-ranging professional interactions shaped his personal experiments with land ownership, management, and conservation. At the shack property, his partner in conservation turned out to be a family friend and hunting companion from Madison, the businessman Tom Coleman. Impressed by the hunting opportunities near the shack, Coleman decided, two years after Leopold’s 1935 land purchase, to buy his own property across the dirt road. e collaboration between the Coleman and Leopold families set the stage for continued cooperative conservation at the shack property in the decades to follow. Pioneers in Ecological Restoration At the time of Aldo Leopold’s death in April 1948 at the age of sixty-one, he and his family had begun nursing the land around the shack back to health from the poor farming practices of previous owners.3 is land provided Sowing the Seeds of the Leopold Memorial Reserve Idea 30 Aldo Leopold (right) and Thomas Coleman cooking over a campfire, 1940s. (Aldo Leopold Foundation, call no. S01999) Leopold with a testing ground for a series of ad hoc experiments on habitat improvement, many of which were later formalized into an evolving series of comprehensive management plans for the Leopold Memorial Reserve. Sometimes important discoveries occurred quite by accident. Leopold’s daughter Estella recalled with great fondness, for example, her father’s growing appreciation for the role of fire in restoring prairie ecosystems following the simple act of forming a fire break around the shack: “Dad got these long pieces of corrugated tin, roofing tin, and [he’d] punch holes in each end and put some wires on them as a handle.” en, to form a fire break, the family would pair them and burn in between. By moving the tins and burning between the pairs to form a perimeter of charred vegetation around the shack, the family protected their dwelling from fire. A fire arriving at this strip of land would have a greater chance of burning out from a lack of fuel. To keep the fires between the corrugated tins under control, they used “mops and brooms and pails of water to stick the broom in and even some long burlap sacks that we could put on a stick and put in the water . . . to mat out something you wanted to control.” Not long after, Estella’s father discovered that a nice mix of prairie plant species germinated in the fire breaks that he had initially formed to protect the shack: “What he saw . . . coming up on the fire lanes was more perennial native grasses than the other area, the control.”4 Naturally, the family’s next landmanagement decision was to burn not just fire breaks but whole fields. Estella’s account of the way her father experimented with and learned...

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