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From: Laura Coble [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 1:18 PM To: 'mnbird at lists.mnbird.net' Subject: Sand County Almanac quote I'm rereading the Sand County Almanac, from essays by Aldo Leopold, the birder, writer, hunter, and early conservationist from Wisconsin. Leopold was working on the book in 1948, and died before the book was finished, so his son, Luna, published it in 1949 through Oxford University Press. This quote is about the birds who benefited from Clandeboye Marsh on the edge of Lake Manitoba in Canada. This marsh and others were soon to be altered by a dam. The Manitoba wildlife associations have since helped to push through changes that has restored some of the area's marshland and lakes, by destruction of the dam and wiser management (or none). I thought of what has happened recently to two wonderful wetland marshes in MN, specifically on 140th St. and 180th St. in SE MN, which are on privately owned land. For a number of reasons, including the agriculture and/or industry surrounding them, they have declined drastically. This doesn't seem like a cycle, but I've been in MN just 4 years, so some of you may know better. Anyway, in his poetic prose, Leopold states perfectly the importance of understanding how vital and changing our marshes are: "Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another." "One thing most of us have gone blind to is the quality of marshes. I am reminded of this when, as a special favor, I take a visitor to Clandeboye, only to find that, to him, it is merely lonelier to look upon, and stickier to navigate, than other boggy places." "This is strange, for any pelican, duckhawk (Perigrine Falcon), godwit, or western grebe is aware that Clandeboye is a marsh apart. Why else do they seek it out in preference to other marshes? Why else do they resent my intrusion within its precincts not as mere trespass, but as some kind of cosmic impropriety?" "I think the secret is this: Clandeboye is a marsh apart, not only in space, but in time. Only the uncritical consumers of hand-me-down history suppose that 1941 arrived simultaneously in all marshes. Let a squadron of southbound pelicans but feel a lift of prairie breeze over Clandeboye, and they sense at once that here is a landing in the geological past, a refuge from that most relentless of aggressors, the future. With queer antediluvian grunts they set wing, descending in majestic spirals to the welcoming wastes of a bygone age." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20071122/3a38fbc0/attachment.html
