FIELD NOTES:
January Observations
~ by Jim Eagleman
“ January observations can be as simple and peaceful as snow and almost as continuous as cold. There is time not only to see who has done what but to speculate why.”
These words were barely legible on the chalkboard and greeted us as we slogged into a dimly lit classroom one day in the winter term, 1973. I recall not being in the best of moods with a leaky shoe and wet foot after trudging through the snow. I was cold and hungry. The lights were purposely kept low on the university campus, a cost saving measure by administrators but doing nothing to help student morale. The professor ambled in and we began our discussion.
All that month we had been reading Game Management, a thick text written with many equations, tables, and graphs by renowned scientist and author Aldo Leopold. For additional credit, his now famous work, A Sand County Almanac, was assigned to those, like me, who thought themselves budding biologists. But distracted, I was more interested in a girl whose father was dean of the graduate school. I tried to impress her, but it didn’ t work. She was engaged by the end of the term to a dental student.
Leopold, we were told, would state his opinions and carefully gathered observations, substantiating them with facts. This long-held and methodical habit made him credible among peers and likely a candidate for us to mentor. I recall a photo in a text that showed his students in the 1940s in dark coats and hats, wearing rubber boots and scarves. On a class assignment, they were sent out from the University of Wisconsin campus, where Leopold taught, to gather field data. Leopold recorded these trips, discussions, and observations and included them with his own notes to establish and refine the new field of wildlife science.
We were spared a similar assignment on that very cold day in 1973, but were advised that anyone attending that summer’ s field station session would almost assuredly be out and observing. Months later, a few of us signed up and stayed at the university-owned natural area near the Mississippi River in western Illinois. It was for me one of the best decisions and experiences I ever
42 Our Brown County Jan./ Feb. 2017