I'm reading The View From Lazy Point by Carl Safina.

"...pure sensuous detail, seeing the natural world from a variety of angles..." Newsday

Reading The View from Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World, migration is starting to grow.

I see parallels to our Driftless Area, a place seemingly destined to being overwhelmed with well meaning, but all too human, homo-sapiens. Will our wildlife and wild places survive the next decades?

from the chapter; Travels Polar - Bear Witness - Southeast Alaska,

 "I'm here to see a tinkered-with place that has saved all its parts and to try to understand why it's still working. What will surprise me is that it's not so much virgin and pristine - thought there's a lot of that, too- as recovered and recovering. It's a place where people have had the luxury of learning from their mistakes. And there's a reason for that too." 

"Defying gravity and all good sense, salmon flow uphill. From the heart of the ocean, salmon beat upstream and inland like flowing blood, until lodged in a thin film of water in a tiny tributary, each is a corpuscle in a capillary. This upstream influx, this invasion creates extra ordinary effects. Salmon are energy. They are matériel. Follow that thought uphill; the trees are made largely of salmon."

The focus today is the work they did feeding, housing and teaching  volunteers ('boomers') who arrived at their farm house each spring  to watch and document the mating activity of the prairie chickens. These boomers provided data to the research for decades. 

This is one of 10 books Fran wrote and they give insights into the hard work and ingenuity it took (and still takes) to be ground breaking wildlife researchers. They were students of Aldo Leopold. 

It's been awhile since we've been on adventures with Fran. You can find my previous readings online under -podcasts -archives.  Great stories are always guaranteed to be found in her books. 

From the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame (wchf.org) about the Hamerstroms;

Married in 1931, the Hamerstroms forged one of the most remarkable wildlife ecology teams. Research fellows under Aldo Leopold, the Hamerstroms have become best known for their work with prairie chickens at the Central Wisconsin Game Project near Neenah and the Prairie Grouse Research Unit in Plainfield. Their work was the basis for the conservation effort which saved the prairie chicken from extirpation in Wisconsin.

Together and individually, the Hamerstrom published over 100 professional papers and many reviews of ornithological literature. Frances also published 10 books. Frederick was a highly skilled technical writer and editor. He edited the books that Fran wrote – the last one only two days before his death. He also edited technical papers for several journals and was the Principal Referee for Raptor Research.