Eisele: Passenger pigeon symbolizes Leopold's vision

Tim Eisele, Correspondent for The Capital Times  —  5/22/2008 8:26 am

PRAIRIE DU CHIEN -- Sixty-one years ago last week, Aldo Leopold presented a major address at the unveiling of a monument at Wyalusing State Park in memory of the passenger pigeon, which once darkened Wisconsin's skies.

That speech, May 11, 1947, was recalled last week by Michael Douglass, director of Villa Louis in Prairie du Chien at The Upper Mississippi River Festival's "Celebrating a River of Life" for students in southwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa schools.

Douglass told how one of the most influential ecologists who helped people understand their relationship to the river and the land was the late Leopold, who grew up in the 1890s along the Mississippi River in Burlington, Iowa.

Leopold studied how people interacted with the land and recalled that the passenger pigeon, which numbered in the millions, was very easy to catch and shoot and became extinct by 1914.

Douglass recounted the ceremonies held at Wyalusing State Park, on May 11, 1947, when Leopold dedicated the monument in remembrance of the passage of the passenger pigeon.

Leopold shared those comments in his book A Sand County Almanac, from which Douglass read: "We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again, the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.

"Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.

"This monument, perched like a duck hawk on this cliff, will scan this wide valley, watching through the days and years. For many a March it will watch the geese go by, telling the river about clearer, colder, lonelier waters on the tundra. ... But no pigeons will pass, for there are no pigeons, save only this flightless one, graven in bronze on this rock. Tourists will read this inscription, but their thoughts will not take wing."

Douglass recommended that the students think about how Leopold was asking people to understand their relationship with living things.

"You need to know A Sand County Almanac, and this man who speaks with a voice across time," Douglass said. "He calls us to a sensitivity with this land, and reflect on our relationship with land as a community to be loved and respected. Think about how this park and these bluffs have moved people to think about relationships with the land."

Wyalusing State park is about a two-hour drive west of Madison. It is located on County Highway X in northwestern Grant County, south of Prairie du Chien.

Photo: Michael Douglass, director of Villa Louis Historical site in Prairie du Chien, is dressed in 1800's clothes to talk about early life on the Mississippi River, which included harvesting clam shells to make buttons.

Photo: The monument to the passenger pigeon, now extinct, is located in Wyalusing State Park overlooking the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Photos by Tim Eisele

Tim Eisele, Correspondent for The Capital Times  —  5/22/2008 8:26 am