- Today, we are pleased to introduce Susan Tupper
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter
and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or museum's employees.
Susan Tupper lives in Amherst Junction, Wisconsin,
where she can often be found working in her garden.
She was a library media specialist for the Rosholt
School District for 26 years.
She served on the advisory broad for the UW-Madison's Cooperative
Children's Book Center for three years and is a former recipient
of an Excellence in Teaching Fellowship Award
from the Herbert Kohl Foundation.
She has written for local newspapers in central Wisconsin,
but this is her first published book and it was a finalist in
three categories for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Those categories were biography, children's nonfiction,
and science and nature.
Here today to share the story of Fran and Frederick Hamerstrom,
please join me in welcoming Susan Tupper.
[applause]
- Hello, everybody.
Thank you so much for coming today.
It's such a beautiful day of sunshine,
I was wondering how many people would want to come in from
all of that, but I'm glad to see so many people here.
I'm excited to be able to be here today and to share
my stories about Fran and Frederick Hamerstrom.
This is actually the very last Badger Biography that was
published by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Unfortunately, there were 27 altogether.
I see that many of them are out in the lobby.
And it's a wonderful, wonderful series,
and I'm very lucky that I got to get
my book in at the very end.
So I'm sad to see it end, but if you have not had a chance to
pick up a Badger Biography, I highly recommend them.
So, I'm curious if anybody here
might have known Fran or Frederick
because usually when I have spoken there are at least
one or two people in the audience who do,
who did know them.
If you did, raise your hand.
Okay, we have-- Okay, thank you.
Maybe you can share a story at the end.
So just to start out then, for those of you who may not know
much about Fran and Frederick, they were conservationists,
biologists and ornithologists and they worked for the
Wisconsin DNR and they spent their entire life
studying the habitat of this bird.
And that is the greater prairie chicken.
That actually is two male chickens
who are at a stand-off with each other.
And it is a sight that you often see in the spring
on the Buena Vista Marsh.
And that is thanks to the work that the Hamerstroms did.
They are widely credited with
having saved this bird from extinction.
And they were very close friends of Aldo Leopold.
And, in fact, they were both his graduate students.
And Fran was the only woman to have the distinction of being
the first to be his graduate student.
And they were very close friends with Leopold,
and they shared many, many beliefs with Leopold.
And one of those is that it was important for them
to take care of the natural world.
And so I have been interested in this story ever since
I moved to central Wisconsin about 40 years ago.
I first started hearing about the Hamerstroms, and then,
in my job as a children's librarian for 26 years,
I often thought that this would be the perfect story for kids.
And that's how I ended up writing it.
It has every element that kids would love,
and grown-ups I think too.
It's a story about a family who lived with wild birds.
Fran loved wild birds.
She always had an owl flying in her house.
She was always rehabilitating eagles and hawks in her barn.
You never knew what you were going to run into when you
visited the Hamerstroms because if you opened up the freezer,
there might be frozen mice in the freezer
or a big fox snake on the counter.
And they were just a very fun-loving,
inspirational couple.
They always lived in old farmhouses.
They had no heat or plumbing.
They used wood stoves to heat their house.
They bathed in their pond in the summer
by skinny dipping in their pond.
And they embraced everybody who wanted to come and join them
in their birding and trapping adventures.
So it's a very fun story.
And I'm going to just back up just a minute,
and I'm going to start back at the beginning
and tell you where they came from.
So here's a picture of Fran when she was seven.
She's holding the hand of her governess,
and she's wearing very--
She's wearing clothes that her parents ordered her
from London, and she doesn't look a bit happy about it.
[laughter]
She was born to a very wealthy family near Boston.
And from the very beginning, her parents assumed that she was
going to grow up to marry a wealthy man
and be a lady of leisure.
But Fran also had different ideas.
Fran, from the time she was a very young girl,
loved to run around in the woods and the fields and the streams.
She loved to dig up bugs and insects.
She loved to climb trees.
She climbed trees her whole entire life
until well into her late 80s.
And, as a young girl, she often climbed down the tree
outside her bedroom window.
And she would sleep outside where she could hear
the night sounds because that would lull her to sleep.
She would stash razor blades and knives in little holes in the
trees around her yard, and she would cut up dead birds
and animals and examine their organs.
And she even had a secret wildlife animal hospital
that she kept hidden from her parents,
and she would bring sick animals there to take care of them
and try to nurse them back to health.
She never graduated from high school,
even though she was very bright, because she said she simply
couldn't be bothered with things that were of no interest to her.
[laughter]
So, Frederick was a different kind of child.
Frederick also grew up on the east coast.
He was very studious, kind, honest, and hardworking.
And he loved to run around in the fields and woods as well.
And his good study habits actually earned him a place
at Dartmouth College, and that is where he and Fran met
on a blind date one night.
And they said that they fell in love on that very first date,
and then, two dates later, they became secretly engaged
and they were married shortly after
Frederick graduated from college.
And here's a favorite picture of mine
the summer after they were married.
And they looked pretty dressed up here.
They were actually caretakers that summer
on Cape Cod for a family friend.
So I kind of wonder what they were doing
when she's wearing heels and--
[laughter]
But shortly after this picture was taken,
Frederick went to New York City
to attend a wildlife conference.
And that is where he first heard Aldo Leopold speaking
for the very first time.
And Frederick, at that point,
was looking for a direction for his life.
And he was totally mesmerized
by what Aldo Leopold was talking about.
This was shortly after we had just lost
the entire population of passenger pigeons.
Just a few years later.
And scientists were very concerned at the time
about our wildlife population.
And Leopold was talking about this new program
that he was starting at the University of Wisconsin
in Madison, and he called it Wildlife Management.
And Frederick was totally mesmerized
by what Leopold was saying,
and he felt that that was the direction that he wanted to go.
So he then applied for research assistantships throughout the
United States, and he landed a research assistantship job
at the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa,
with another prominent wildlife researcher, Dr. Paul Errington.
And then he and Fran moved to Iowa in 1932,
and they both went to school.
Frederick went to get his graduate degree,
and Fran actually went back to college
and she graduated from Iowa.
And when they were done with school there, in 1935,
they were looking around for jobs and Frederick accepted
a job in Necedah, Wisconsin.
And that is how he ended up here.
And here is a picture of the first house
that they moved into in Necedah.
This is very much like every single house
they lived in their entire life.
They loved these old abandoned farmhouses.
They would not have chosen to live in anything else but that.
This house had no central heat.
It had no plumbing. It had no insulation.
And it was in the middle of nowhere,
and they were ecstatically happy with that.
And Frederick's job was to work
for FDR's resettlement commission.
And he was, his responsibility was to map all of that wild land
that was part of Juneau County and Adams County
and that would, in a few years,
become the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge.
And so he and Fran tromped around in the woods.
He had 500 men working for him at the time.
He lined them up, they walked through those counties,
and they mapped every single natural feature
that they could find.
And that did, in fact, lead to the establishment
of the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in 1939.
But they had left the year prior to that.
They had decided after three years in Necedah that they
needed even more education, and that was when they had applied
to Aldo Leopold's graduate program.
And he had accepted them both.
He only accepted five students a year,
but he accepted both Fran and Frederick.
And they had gone to Madison, and they were studying
with Leopold in Madison.
And so, after a year-and-a-half in Madison,
they had to leave again.
They had to go back to the rural areas because they needed to
pick a graduate research project, an animal to study.
And it was Aldo Leopold who actually assigned the prairie
chicken research to Frederick, and that is how he set him
on the path to save the prairie chickens.
And Aldo Leopold also found a house for them in Hancock.
An old abandoned farmhouse.
They moved into it on New Year's Eve.
They went to a party in Madison on New Year's Eve.
Right after the party ended, they got in the car
and they drove north and they found this old abandoned house
in the dark and crawled into bed.
And the next day they started their prairie chicken research.
And when they started, there was not a lot known
about the bird at the time.
In fact, people weren't even sure where they could be found.
And so they had to ask neighbors in Hancock
where they had seen them,
and they were told that there were some in the Leola Marsh,
about seven miles away.
So they set about setting out trap lines,
daily walking their trap lines twice a day, in the cold,
and trapping and banding birds and trying to start up
getting research and some data on prairie chickens.
Here is a picture of Fran banding one of the birds.
And one of the things that she had to learn,
and Frederick also, was how to handle these birds carefully.
You notice that she's not wearing gloves
because they're actually quite a delicate bird.
And they discovered that if they wore gloves,
it would sometimes remove all those little pin feathers on
their legs, and that could actually lead to exposure
and the bird would die.
They were very fragile.
They had to be handled very carefully.
And during this time, Aldo Leopold would come
and he would visit them.
Here's a picture of the three of them.
Aldo Leopold, you know, was at his shack in Baraboo,
so it wasn't too far away from Hancock at the time.
So he would buzz up and spend a day.
They would hunt. They loved to hunt.
And then he would go through their research with them and
kind of help direct them as to what they needed to do next.
So on one visit-- Here's a story that is my editor's favorite
story in the book-- On one visit Aldo Leopold said that they had
to figure out a way to determine the relative age
of the prairie chicken.
And Fran started to think about that,
and she suddenly remembered a story
that an old Scottish gamekeeper had told her.
He had said that you could kill a bird by biting it
in the head, right behind the ear.
So Fran, of course, had to try that.
And she picked up a bird, bit it in the head behind the ear and,
sure enough, the bird died.
And, of course, she didn't want to kill prairie chickens that
way, but what they did do then was they would go into bars
in Hancock and every Sunday afternoon when the hunters
would come in with their bags of prairie chickens
and they would offer to pluck the birds.
And Fran would pick up the bird and she would bite it
in the skull just for effect.
And she soon realized that some of the bird skulls
were hard and some were soft.
And she quickly then surmised that it was the old birds
that had the hard skulls and the young birds
that had the soft skulls.
And she suddenly realized she had figured out a way
to age the chickens by biting them in their head.
[laughter]
And her real love was raptors.
Fran only worked half-time for the DNR,
so she had half of her work time
that she could devote to her own projects.
And she always loved raptors.
She was a natural with raptors.
And so she had a 25-year study of kestrels
that she started and maintained.
And it had to do with putting up kestrel boxes all over
the Buena Vista Marsh because she thought that that would
encourage more kestrels to come and nest.
And she also had a 30-year project involving harriers,
or marsh hawks.
And they needed help with all this work.
So that was the point where they decided to start
an apprentice program for young people interested in
research and wildlife.
And they offered free room and board to college students
who might be interested in working alongside
scientists and helping them.
And that program became a roaring success.
They had over a hundred young people come and live with them
and stay with them during those years
and helped Fran and Frederick with their research.
And they nicknamed these people gaboons,
which is an African word for slave labor.
And they did everything that the Hamerstroms needed done:
mowing lawns, sitting next to traps,
watching for birds to land, going out on roadkill runs.
They did everything.
And here is a picture of a young gaboon.
It looks like they worked them to death.
And the owl is Ambrose. They always had an owl.
The owl was allowed to fly freely through the house.
And the only place that that owl was not allowed
was Frederick's office.
And you can see, in the corner behind the chair,
that there is screening covering the door,
and that's the door to Frederick's office.
So he was not allowed in there.
And the young boy is Gary Anweiler,
who is a bit younger than most of their gaboons.
He had come to them before his senior year in college,
in high school, and he had come from Canada.
And this was his first trip away from home.
He had come with a friend, and they had been recommended by
their high school teacher because they loved birds.
And Gary has a story that is a great story, I think,
that illustrates what it was like to work with Fran.
And he tells the story of one night she came to them and she
said, "We need to go get some bait birds for my traps."
And it was late at night.
Frederick had gone to bed because Frederick never wanted
to participate in Fran's nighttime soirees.
So she took the gaboons out to a neighbor's barn.
He was asleep too. The farmer was asleep.
And they snuck into the barn and she had gunnysacks with her.
And up on the rafters were pigeons
and starlings and sparrows.
And she said, "Climb up there in the dark, get those birds,
throw them down to me, and I'm going to pick them up,
I'm going to put them in my gunnysacks."
So Gary Anweiler was terrified, but he took one look at Fran
and he thought, "Oh, no, I can't say no, she won't take that."
And up he went and performed his task and came back down
and actually felt pretty good because he had managed to do
something he'd never done before.
And I think that is why this program that they ran with these
gaboons was so successful because Fran and Frederick
always just expected that they would do this.
They didn't take no for an answer.
They would just show them how to do something
and then leave them and expect that it would get done.
So people learned a lot hanging out with them.
Here is a picture of Fran.
And this is an eagle, a golden eagle named Nancy.
And she was a natural raptor rehabilitator.
People brought her sick birds from everywhere.
And this bird a friend of hers had found in Illinois,
very sick from lots of tick bites,
and had called Fran and she had come to pick her up,
take her home, nurse her back to health,
and then she had to also take the birds out to the fields
and teach them to fly and to hunt again.
And when she finished with Nancy
and she was ready to release her,
she drove her all the way to Wyoming,
where she could release her where she thought it would be
the safest place for Nancy.
And she also had another bird named Kris.
Another golden eagle that she tried to
artificially inseminate for years.
It was one of the first time that anybody in the United
States tried to artificially inseminate an eagle.
And Fran got very, very close to success,
but she didn't quite get that last over the hump done.
And so she donated that bird to the Cornell Bird Laboratory
at Cornell University.
They actually were the first to artificially inseminate
her bird, Kris, in 1972.
Here is another iconic Hamerstrom image.
People always told me when I was talking to them about Fran and
Frederick that they remembered seeing them
driving around the countryside in their VW vans.
And they were like little mini research stations.
They would pack them up and spend the day out in the fields.
You can see that there are some bait birds on top.
And inside they would have cages of mice, extra traps.
You can see that there's a pile of paperwork in there.
And they would also have a little cook stove
so that they could heat food up
if they were out for a long time.
And Fran was a crazy driver.
Fran loved to drive fast. She liked to hit speed bumps.
She got a big kick out of that.
And one of the gaboon chores
that they had was to pick up roadkill.
They used a lot of roadkill at the Hamerstrom house.
And she had a little technique, which was she would be driving,
a gaboon would be in the back.
He would get down on the floor, and she would slowly inch
her van over to the dead animal.
And the gaboon then would slide open the door.
His job was to lean out, grab it, throw it into the van,
and she didn't have to stop.
And of course they had no idea how decomposed that animal was.
[laughter]
So that made for some really exciting moments in the van.
And Fran also would sometimes follow the Plainfield vegetable
trucks, and they would watch for vegetables that would fly off
the vegetable trucks and they would grab vegetables
off of the road also.
They were very big entertainers, the Hamerstroms,
even though they had a small budget.
And that is why they really had to exist on roadkill.
And, also, they did hunt. They hunted deer and birds.
But they supplemented their diet with roadkill.
And Fran's cooking was quite legendary.
Some people thought it was delicious and other people
thought it was inedible, basically.
And so dinner at the Hamerstrom's
could be quite an adventure sometimes.
One gaboon talks about how he was on his way to visit them
and he saw a big fox snake on the road.
So he picked it up, took it to Fran,
thought she would probably chop it up and feed it to her eagles.
And then he sat down to lunch.
And on his plate were big chunks of fried snake
that looked like bratwurst.
And he said he would be extra careful about what he was going
to bring Fran in the future.
[laughter]
And she had a specialty of making pies.
She liked to use bear lard.
So if she got a bunch of bear lard,
her technique was to make a bunch of piecrusts at once,
and then she stacked them up on her shelf in the kitchen
and then she could fill them.
When guests would arrive, she would just fill it
with the filling, bake them, and she'd be ready to go.
And she also wrote a wild food cookbook.
And at that time she became a favorite guest
on the David Letterman show.
He liked to have her come and demonstrate
cooking up some wild food delicacy.
And you can actually see some of these.
You can Google that on YouTube.
Just Google David Letterman and Fran Hamerstrom,
and you can see some of these episodes.
So I Googled this recently, and I watched a segment
where it's pretty hilarious because Fran is about,
she's in her 80s and she's puttering around on stage.
She is a ham, so she's having the time of her life.
And she lays out a giant fox snake,
picks up a big cleaver and whacks it into pieces.
And then she throws it into a frying pan, fries it up,
and then puts it on a cracker and tries to stuff it
into David Letterman's mouth.
[laughter]
And then for a little added effect,
she grabs a garter snake out of her purse
and dangles that in front of his face.
[laughter]
Now here are a couple pictures of their home in Plainfield.
This was-- They moved into this house in 1949.
And this was a house built during the Civil War.
The second floor was a ballroom, and they converted it to a bunk
room because they actually had, they had the need for housing
quite a few people during booming season when people would
volunteer to come and help them count prairie chickens.
And they had space for 23 people in that bedroom upstairs.
And here is a picture of the great room at their house.
They were not known for housekeeping.
And everybody that I talked to says that.
They said the house is a mess. There were papers everywhere.
Of course, there was an owl flying around too,
so you can imagine.
And there were five wood stoves in the house, heating it.
So this is-- You can see one big wood stove here.
And this is the room that they would gather with friends
and their gaboons and kind of their meeting room.
Here is Frederick's office.
You can see the screening,
screening off the owl by the door.
And, again, books and papers and a wood stove.
And here's a picture of Frederick.
He is briefing the boomers.
The boomers are the people that would come to help them count
prairie chickens in the spring during mating season.
They called that booming season.
And they had 10 leks, that is a word for booming grounds.
They had 10 leks that they would have to go monitor.
And so they needed, really, 20 people.
And every night a new crew would show up and Frederick would
always brief them and then they would go to bed and they would
get up at 3:00 AM and go out into the blinds
and count the prairie chickens.
My husband and I did this one time.
You can also do this.
You can still volunteer to go out and count
prairie chickens in the spring.
You can sign up with the DNR or you can go on the UWSP website,
and you can find a link there to sign up
to go watch the prairie chickens.
And it is really an incredible activity.
So we got up at 3:00 AM that morning,
and it was really a cold April.
There was still snow on the ground.
It was April 19th.
And we drove to the Buena Vista Marsh,
and we were dropped off by our guide at the end of a field
with a couple tire ruts going across.
And he said just follow, it's dark out,
and he said just follow the tire tracks
and you will find the blind.
So of course I was thinking we were going to end up
off somewhere in the Buena Vista Marsh,
but we actually got into the blind in time.
You have to be there before 5:00 AM because any noise will
distract the birds and they won't come down.
And we, so we got situated and we were there until about 7:30,
and we did see eight prairie chickens that day.
We saw five females and three males come in.
So it is a really wonderful activity.
They do this little mating dance that they are famous for,
and they have these incredible booming calls
and it's really a sight that not very many people get to see.
So it was worth it.
And I also was freezing despite the fact
that I was really dressed warm.
So that gave me a new appreciation for all
that the Hamerstroms went through in all those years
that they were studying the prairie chickens.
So here is a picture of the blind.
And this is what it would look like.
This is the Buena Vista Marsh.
And you can see that there's some
sandhill cranes out in front.
It is an area where it's a great bird-watching area year round.
And then you sit in this little plywood building with
little slits, and that is where the blinds were located.
So after a few years of studying the prairie chickens,
Fran and Frederick realized that the only way to save them
was to save their habitat.
And so they set about on a PR campaign
to try to set aside prairie.
That's what the birds needed. They needed prairie.
And our prairie was disappearing in Wisconsin.
And Frederick came up with a new idea that had never been
tried before called scatter land management.
And in the Buena Vista Marsh, which was the perfect spot
for the prairie chickens, there were some private farms there,
but there were also quite a few empty plots for sale.
And he thought that is no problem for the birds
and the farmers to co-exist together.
In fact, it's probably a better thing for the birds than to be
set aside in a preserve because they can get cover from the
farmer's cornfield and eat some of that corn in the winter.
And so he didn't worry about getting a private preserve.
He just worried about getting somebody
to buy those empty pieces of land.
And he convinced some friends of his that had some money
to purchase some of those 40-acre plots.
And then many, many conservation groups in Wisconsin
also purchased some of those plots.
And it was, it worked.
And it still is the same plan that is used today.
Those people then donated that land to the DNR,
and the DNR manages it and they still manage it today.
That is really where most of the prairie chickens are left today
is in the Buena Vista Marsh.
And here is a sign that you will find out on the marsh
commemorating the very first purchase of that land.
And this is a friend of the Hamerstroms
who bought that first 40 acres.
That plan that Frederick devised was used constantly afterward
for many, many species in the United States.
It never had been used before, but it became,
people realized that you could do this.
You didn't have to always have a preserve.
And so that was a wonderful thing
that Frederick came up with at the time.
So in 1973, Frederick and Fran retired from the DNR,
and they started to spend their winters in Texas and Mexico.
They could study the birds in the winter there.
And here's a picture of Frederick in Mexico
with a big osprey nest.
I think that's a mirror.
If I recall, I think that's a mirror on his pole,
and he's trying to see into that nest.
Frederick died 10 years before Fran.
He died in his 80s from pancreatic cancer.
And she then went on for 10 more years, and,
just like you can imagine, Fran made the best of it.
She decided one thing she wanted to do was
to visit some warm climates, and they had many gaboon,
former gaboons that were living in warm climates.
And so she took full advantage of that.
And here is a picture of her.
She's visiting a former gaboon here
that was a falconer to a sheikh.
And after that, her next trip was to Africa.
She wanted to hunt with the pygmies.
So she contacted a gaboon who was living in Africa
on a research station where the pygmies were living.
And then she went to Texas, and she was in her 80s
at this point in time.
She went to Texas and in order to get in shape,
she ran and she climbed trees and she learned Swahili.
And then she flew to Africa, and when she got to Africa,
she had to hitch a ride by herself.
She landed and then she had to hitch a ride
for 500 miles out to the jungle.
So she hitched a ride with a truck driver.
Here she is.
When the truck driver dropped her off at the research station,
Fran was wearing a t-shirt and shorts and sandals
and she had a little tiny knapsack with her
and that was it.
And the truck driver was in love with her.
He said, "I brought you your grandmother."
And he obviously had had the time of his life
driving 500 miles with Fran,
who is probably telling him wild stories the whole way.
And then, when she was there, she convinced the pygmies
to take her out alone for a week in the woods
and go hunting with them.
And this little guy, she really liked this pygmy.
He actually is married and has a family.
And she wanted to bring him back to Wisconsin so badly.
[laughter]
But the people at the research station convinced her
that that wouldn't be really good for he or his family.
And then her last trip was down the Amazon.
She was 86 at the time.
And she wanted to hunt with the native tribesmen on the Amazon.
And she wanted to learn how to use their blow guns.
So, she broke her hip.
She went to the Amazon and canoeing in a dugout canoe,
and she got out, stepped on the bank, and broke her hip.
And then she ended up in a native hospital.
First she was in a religious hospital,
and she demanded to be transferred
because they weren't feeding her enough meat.
So they transferred her to a native hospital.
And it took two weeks before her daughter, Elva,
could get her out of the hospital and get her home
to Oregon to get surgery and get rehabilitated.
So then Fran decided she was going to go back the next year
and finish that trip.
And this spring I was at the Prairie Chicken Festival,
and I heard the rest of that story,
which I've never heard before.
And you get to be the first to hear it.
So, she was getting ready for her second trip to the Amazon
and she was climbing trees and she fell and broke
a vertebrate in her back.
And she didn't want to go to the hospital.
So she called up these friends
and convinced them to come and get her
and let her stay with them for a while until she healed up.
And they were at the house the first night
and they looked at Fran and realized that she couldn't move,
and there was no way she was going to get into a bed.
So they went out to the garage
and they picked up a big piece of plywood,
brought it in, held it up to Fran's back,
and lowered her to the floor, and then covered her
with blankets and let her sleep like that.
And the next morning they picked the plywood up
so that she could stand up and walk around.
And that's what they did for a week
until Fran could actually move and heal up a little more.
And then, she healed up and she went back
to the Amazon and she finished that trip.
So before I end, whoops, before I end, I do want to just say,
want to just mention what is going on
with the prairie chickens today.
As I said, there are will prairie chickens in Wisconsin
thanks to Fran and Frederick's work.
They're at an all-time low of about 1500 birds right now.
And the scientists are somewhat concerned
because there's a lot of genetic inbreeding.
And they have attempted to bring in other groups
or other birds to inbreed with them.
And that has helped temporarily,
but right now we need more prairie.
And that will hopefully expand the flock because the flock is
pretty small right now for health of the birds.
And there are groups in Wisconsin that are working
on that, that are trying to set aside prairie
that would be adjacent to the Buena Vista Marsh
so that they could increase that area.
And I'm just going to end with
one of my favorite Aldo Leopold quotes,
which I think sums up what Fran and Frederick were all about.
"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted
"until progress began to do away with them.
"And now we face the question whether a still higher standard
"of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
"For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese
"is more important than television."
Thank you.
You've been wonderful listeners.
I think we have maybe five minutes.
There are a couple people here who knew them.
Would you like to share some stories?
[applause]