Pheasant tracks in the snow. According to Aldo Leopold

Pheasant tracks in the snow. According to Aldo Leopold, theRiley area was “devoid of pheasants” until the Riley Game

Cooperative stocked it in 1931.

UW Department of Wildlife Ecology

Four years before AldoLeopold acquired thefarm along the Wis-consin River that

became incubator and inspira-tion for A Sand CountyAlmanac, the great naturalistdeveloped an interest in anotherswath of southern Wisconsinreal estate. This land, however,Leopold did not purchase. Hesimply wanted a place to huntbirds and test his game-manage-ment theories.

One Sunday morning in thesummer of 1931, while explor-ing the dairy country southwestof Madison, he stopped at thefarm of Reuben Paulson andasked for a drink of water. The two men fell to talking, andsomething surprising transpired. “He needed relief from tres-passers who each year poached his birds despite his signs,”Leopold wrote in 1940 in the Journal of Wildlife Management.“I needed a place to try management as a means of building upsomething to hunt. We concluded that a group of farmers,working with a group of town sportsmen, offered the bestdefense against trespass, and also the best chance for buildingup game. Thus was Riley born.”1

By Riley, Leopold meant the Riley Game Cooperative,which he and Paulson formed in 1931 and in which they con-

tinued to be involved for at leastseventeen years. They wereaided by a law that had justbeen passed by the Wisconsinlegislature that authorized thecreation of shooting preserves,the planting of game birds onthose preserves, and the length-ening of hunting seasons onthem.

The Riley Game Coopera-tive was centered in the smallcommunity of Riley, tucked intothe steep hills that mark the ter-minal moraine country ofsouthwestern Dane County. It isabout equal distance betweenMount Horeb and Verona,north of Highway 18. In 1931

Riley included a post office, general store, and railroad waterstop. There were perhaps a dozen houses close by the railroadstop and almost as many farms within a radius of a couplemiles.

One of those farms became the home—during the 1960sand 1970s—of the Silbernagel family, including the authors ofthis article. Although we reaped the benefits of the conserva-tion work begun three decades before—hunted pheasant andsquirrels on the farm; witnessed ducks and geese gliding intothe Sugar River marsh; saw rabbits, fox, and even an occa-sional deer near the cover of the fencerow plantings that

Remembering the Riley Game Cooperative

By Bob Silbernageland Janet Silbernagel

Tracking

Aldo Leopoldthrough Riley’s Farmland

Aldo Leopold with a favorite hunting dog on unidentifiedproperty believed to be on the Riley Game Cooperative.

Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives

S U M M E R 2 0 0 336

W I S C O N S I N M A G A Z I N E O F H I S T O R Y

Leopold had helped engineer—we knew nothing of the RileyGame Cooperative growing up. We learned of it in For theHealth of the Land, a 1999 book of Leopold essays not previ-ously published in book form. It included two articles aboutRiley.

Those articles led us to dig deeper. We found that the coop-erative, despite its longevity and its use by Leopold as aresearch laboratory for his students at the University of Wis-consin, was largely unheralded. Leopold wrote a few articlesabout it, and so have others since his death. But it did notachieve the same sort of conservation celebrity that attached tohis Wisconsin River farm and the shack upon it after the pub-lication of A Sand County Almanac.

Still, Leopold did not ignore Riley. He left a stack of recordsabout the Riley project, many of them in the archives at theUniversity of Wisconsin. Among the things we discovered werecorrespondence between Leopold and Paulson about theorganization of the cooperative, annual reports about the suc-cess of the hunts, and records of bird plantings.2

But it was the hand-drawn maps that grabbed our atten-tion. It’s been more than fifteen years since our parents sold theRiley farm, but the Leopold maps refresh our recollections andmemories of the landscape.

There. That’s the Sugar River slough. Bob and brotherCarl floated a leaky dingy on it, searching the murky waters forturtles, crawdads, and carp. And there are the railroad tracks(today the Military Ridge Bike Trail). The tracks marked thesouthern end of the Sugar River marsh and our property. Weslogged through the knee-deep muck of that marsh, swattingblack flies and pushing heifers back to their pasture.

And here. That shaded zone the map describes as grazedtimber on the J. L. Brannan farm is surely the same woodpatch on the Silbernagel farm where shag-bark hickory treesmingled with oaks and elms. Horses and youngsters foundsummer comfort in their shade and snatched fruit off a wildapple tree. Along the fencerow beside the woods, we gatheredhickory nuts and picked wild plums and grapes.

West beyond the crest of the hill, the woods were a different

Aldo Leopold was an inveterate map maker, and this undated map ofthe Riley Game Cooperative is likely from his hand.


S U M M E R 2 0 0 3 37


world. Stinging nettles and blackberry brambles clutched atour legs. Sumac and poison ivy obscured trails. Raccoon,muskrat, and deer hid in the thick cover. It was a deep wilder-ness, at least for young explorers.

Here, on another map, is our old cornfield just north of themarsh, where we hunted pheasants and raced snowmobileswhen winter snow lay deep enough. Nearby is the pasturewhere we galloped our horses and pastured the cows. Andthere, east of the farmhouse, is the hilltop hay meadow wherea hot-air balloon unexpectedly dropped out of the sky one crispautumn morning. Frightened horses raced for the cover of thewoods.

While the documents from the Leopold archives elic-it nostalgic and sentimental memories for us, theyare not written in the lyrical style of his Sand

County essays. They are more stenographic.“Summary of Winter Feeding at Riley, 1936–37.” “Pheasants Killed on Riley Preserve—1938.” (A total of 65). “Riley Quail Census—1936–37.” They chronicle the rapid growth of the cooperative, from

just three farms to eleven, covering more than 1,700 acres, andthey record the increasing success of the conservation pro-grams. But even in the secretarial style of his annual reports,Leopold could not keep his humor or opinions entirely incheck. This is from a 1940 newsletter to the Riley Game Coop-erative members: “There are several stray cats in the areawhich won’t do our nesting birds any good. Members areencouraged to invite these cats either to come back home, or toget underground where all cats behave.”

There are other stories, only glimpsed in the notes andnewsletters. The low bird kill in 1945 had more to do with ashortage of gasoline and rubber than a shortage of pheasants.A Cooper’s hawk took a hen pheasant near Ken Cook’s feederon February 1, 1941. And John Riley won the annual contestfor the biggest pheasant of the season in 1945.

We decided to follow up on this last item since John Riley isnot just a name on the old documents. The Riley communitygets its moniker from his great-grandfather, Richard, whohomesteaded there. And John Riley now lives about fifteenmiles from Riley in Verona.

We called to test his memory.3

The community of Riley liesin the southwestern part ofDane County along Sugar River(identified as Sugar Creekon what is believed to beLeopold’s map).

Joel Heimangraphic

S U M M E R 2 0 0 338


“I remember that pheasant.It was a snowy day,” Riley said.“I turned seventeen on Christ-mas, and it was right after that.”December 31, according toLeopold’s newsletter. “I waspoking around in the woodsnear Paulson Road. I was bymyself. I didn’t have a dog oranything. When the roosterwent up I winged him. I had totrack him in the snow into thethicket. How big did they say itwas?”

The newsletter listed it at1,500 grams.

“That’s right, they measuredeverything in grams,” Johnrecalled.

For John Riley, memories ofthe Riley Game Cooperativeare bright and pleasant: “Every year they had a big picnic inthe spring. All of the farmers and their families would turn out,and all of the town members. It was a big thing. I rememberone year we had it down at Paulson’s farm, and we playedbaseball in a big pasture. That’s all covered with brush now.”

Each year as well, the town members would host a banquetat a nice restaurant or club in Madison. The farmers and theirsons would attend. “Everybody was all dressed up. It was quitea deal for us farmers,” Riley remembered with a chuckle.

John also remembered Aldo Leopold as “just thegreatest man you’d probably ever want to be around,” some-

one who never abandoned histeaching role, even when out ona hunt. “He’d tell you aboutanything you wanted to know,”John said. “He’d just take a stickand draw things out for you onthe ground. Every year, he’dcome out with two or three stu-dents from his class. They’d fixfences and clear unwantedplants from along thehedgerows.”

Gene Roark is a few yearsyounger than John Riley, buthe, too, remembers the lateryears of the Riley Cooperative,when his father was a townmember of the group. A friendof Leopold, the elder Roarkapparently met him when bothwere on the faculty at the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin.4

“I especially recall one hunt, with my dad and Leopold,when after I’d missed a hen Leopold told me, very softly, thatI was ‘shooting from the hip,’” Roark said. “I felt humiliated,mostly because I knew he was right.” But Roark extracted a bitof revenge later in the day when Leopold’s bird dog, a short-hair that Leopold was very proud of, locked on point on aclump of marsh grass. “I felt I’d gotten even,” Roark remem-bered, “when a big yellow cat erupted from the grass and boththe shorthair and Leopold looked as embarrassed as I’d felt.”5

For the farmers like John Riley and his dad, Wes, the Riley

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WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY BUSINESS PARTNERS

John Riley, whose great-grandfather provided the name for thecommunity of Riley, hunted on the Riley Game Cooperative and

remembers Aldo Leopold and much more.

Joel Heiman photo

S U M M E R 2 0 0 3 39


Game Cooperative wasn’t a part-time effort. Itbecame part of their everyday life. “Every farmhad a feeding station on it for the birds,” Rileysaid. “We furnished the ear corn. The townmembers would buy other feed for them. Andwe covered the feeders with cornstalks.” Young-sters like John were enlisted as foot soldiers inLeopold’s conservation army: “I used to have acopy of a book . . . a ledger . . . where I kepttrack of how many pheasants and other birds wesaw on our farm. One year we had 160-somebirds.”6 John was just a toddler when the RileyGame Cooperative was founded, so he has nopersonal recollection of the natural conditions—the quality of habitat and game availability—prior to the cooperative. But, based on what hisfather and others have told him, it was poor.

Gene Roark also relied on the assessment ofothers and reached a similar conclusion:“Heavy grazing and erosion had reduced coverto bits and pieces, and game of any kind wasscarce. Pheasants were nonexistent.”7

Leopold described the situation this way:“Three years ago, when we first met, to flush arabbit was the biggest adventure one mighthope to fall upon in a day’s hike on the Paulsonfarm.” And this: “Like other outdoorsmen, bothof us had listened patiently to the fair words ofthe prophets of conservation, predicting theearly restoration of outdoor Wisconsin. We bothhad noticed, though, that as prophecies becamethicker and thicker, open seasons for hunting became shorterand shorter, and wild life scarcer and scarcer.”

But assistance came from an unlikely source: the Wis-consin legislature. “Now it so happens that in the samewinter of our discontent . . . there emerged, as out of a

cloud, all duly enacted, the ‘Wisconsin Shooting PreserveLaw,’” Leopold wrote. That law allowed land owners or thosewho controlled land to plant pheasants on the property andshoot three-quarters of the number of planted birds in an openfall season. Furthermore, the law prohibited trespassing on theproperty in question by people other than those involved in theshooting preserve.

Members of the Riley Cooperative were interested in manygame birds, not just pheasants “and still less in shooting pheas-ants recently let out of a coop,” Leopold said. The co-operativemembers, no doubt led by Leopold, quickly figured out, how-

ever, that while the new law restricted shooting of the domes-tically raised pheasants, it had applications to wild birds aswell. “We saw in this a chance to build up a wild population,and to do our shooting on those wild birds, releasing sufficienttame ones to satisfy the requirements of the law,” Leopoldsaid.8

With that in mind, the Riley group applied for and obtaineda shooting-preserve license, initially encompassing three farmsin the area, and released twenty-five pheasant that first year.According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources(DNR), there are approximately fifty licensed shooting pre-serves in the state now; the number fluctuates some as thelicenses for the preserves come up for renewal each June 30.The shooting preserves are used primarily as hunting clubs orbusiness retreats. They differ from game farms, of which thereare about nine hundred licensed in Wisconsin today. Thegame farms can raise game birds and release them year-round

Reuben Paulson, cofounder of the Riley Game Cooperative, witha pheasant about to be released, presumably on his property.



S U M M E R 2 0 0 340

for hunters. The shooting preserves—unlike in Leopold’s day—cannot raise birds. They can only buy them and release adultbirds for hunting from September through February.9

DNR records on the shooting preserves only go back to the1970s, not to the days of the Riley Preserve. But, according toa letter Leopold wrote in September 1932, the Riley Coopera-tive obtained “Shooting Preserve License No. 4” on July 25,1932.10 The Riley Game Cooperative was something muchmore than a gathering of sportsmen who liked to hunt birds. Itbecame, through the direction of naturalist Leopold andfarmer Reuben Paulson, a community endeavor.

It’s tough from a perspective seven decades later, to grasphow difficult life in rural Wisconsin was at that time. Farmingwas only beginning to be mechanized, and dairy farming inparticular required long hours of tedious work. A sustaineddrought made farming even more difficult than normal. And,of course, money was scarce. When the Riley Cooperativebegan, there were as yet no agricultural support programs tohelp farmers ride out the tough times.

Yet somehow, Leopold and Paulson convinced other farm-

ers to join the cooperative—to voluntarily add to their work-loads, give up part of their livestock feed, and eliminate por-tions of their precious pastureland. The Riley GameCooperative began with just three farm members and five townmembers. According to the initial bylaws and letters fromLeopold to Paulson, the farmers supplied land and feed for thepheasants, while town members supplied money—$20 each,annually, in the first years—to purchase birds or eggs, to reim-burse farmers for part of their corn, to provide signs to post theboundaries of the cooperative, and to cover the costs of theannual banquet for the members. Both groups provided laborto build winter feeders for the pheasants and plant pine treesand brush for cover. They all kept eyes out for trespassers andhelped count birds.

And, of course, they hunted. Numerical records of thosehunts are listed in the annual newsletters that Leopold dutiful-ly wrote and mailed to all of the members of the cooperative.But they don’t capture the pleasure that members took in hunt-ing birds in places where there had been little wildlife before.That pleasure is reflected in stories recounted by the likes of

The railroad tracks as they appeared running near the Riley commu-nity in the 1930s. Today the tracks are gone, and the railroad grade is

part of the Military Ridge State Trail.


S U M M E R 2 0 0 3 41


John Riley and Gene Roark, who grew up hunting on thecooperative, and by Leopold’s own, more literary accounts.“To kill one’s first cock on one’s own grounds is a memorableexperience,” he declared.

But it’s clear from the archive record and individual storiesthat the cooperative also became more than just a group ofhunters. It quickly developed into a communal affair thatinvolved not only the men who hunted, but also youngsters andfarm wives. Young people took feed to the pheasant feeding sta-tions during the winter and made daily logs of the pheasants,quail, prairie chickens, Hungarian partridges, rabbits, and foxesthey spotted. Reuben Paulson’s wife was official keeper of thescales. When cooperative members shot a pheasant, they wereto take it to Mrs. Paulson to have it weighed and recorded.

There were gatherings of the farm and town members tobuild the brush shelters that were to provide winter shelter forthe birds and feeders where farmers or their sons could set outcorn. “None of us for years had so enjoyed our winter Sun-days,” Leopold wrote of those gatherings.11

Although Leopold and Paulson sought to keep the size ofthe cooperative small, so that all those involved would alwaysknow each other, it expanded rapidly on the farm side. By thelate 1930s there were eleven farm members and more than1,700 acres involved; this, despite the fact that Leopold some-times hectored the farm members to do more conservation

Around fifty licensed shooting preserves currently exist in the state.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, ResearchReport no. 24, 1960-67.

This letter from Leopold to Paulson dated September 3, 1931, out-lines the purposes and lists the original membership of the Riley

Game Cooperative.


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Recent view of the Riley Game Cooperative area from Highway J southof Riley. At the center of the photo in the distance is a pine plantation

on the corner of the Paulson property.

Joel Heiman photo

work. In a 1935 newsletter he urged each farmer that year toprovide “at least one new cover area fenced against grazing”and “at least one food patch (or equivalent in shocked corn leftin the field over winter).”

In 1937 the cooperative expanded in a new direction. Thatyear, Leopold began using it as an outdoor classroom andresearch facility for his classes at the University of Wisconsin.“If you see a small army coming across your fields, it isn’t theGermans,” he warned the cooperative members in a 1940newsletter. “It’s just Professor Leopold’s class in wildlife ecolo-gy, learning how farmers, town sportsmen, and birds all find‘Lebensraum’ at Riley.”

When war came, the Riley Cooperative did not forget thosewho went abroad. Leopold provided extra copies of hisnewsletter to all Riley members so they could send them tosons in the military “whose hunting this year was not of theRiley variety.” The war also drained the cooperative of man-power. In 1942 there were not enough people to plant all theNorway pines the cooperative had ordered. In his newsletter,

Leopold offered the trees to any and all takers. Still, neitherdrought nor depression, war nor postwar boom brought thedemise of the Riley Cooperative. In 1948, just a few monthsbefore his death, Leopold despaired at the high cost of pheas-ants to plant and the poor growing seasons the past three years.He wondered “whether the Riley enterprise should continue.”He was quickly reassured that the majority of Riley memberswanted it to carry on.12

The cooperative changed the Riley landscape in anumber of ways. For example, there were regularplantings of pheasants, carefully catalogued each

year. But other game species, including quail, Hungarian par-tridge, ruffed grouse, and prairie chicken began to appear spo-radically as cover improved. And cover improved largelyunder Leopold’s guidance. To overcome chronic overgrazingof most of the area, yet not seriously affect the farmers’ abilityto take care of their cows and hogs, Leopold concentrated onwhat he called “foul-weather cover.” “It consists of cattail bogs

too soft for cattle to enter, bush wil-low along streams and railroad tracks,and grape tangles or plum thickets infencerows.”13 The members of thecooperative also developed plantingsof evergreen trees, mostly red andNorway pine, fenced off from cattle.

They learned from painful experi-ence. A severe drought in 1934 and1936 cost them many of the plant-ings, and inadequate fences allowedanimals to get in and destroy others.But they tried again, with assistancefrom the University of Wisconsin stu-dents and depression-era CivilianConservation Corps crews. By 1939,when another drought hit, most of theplantings survived.14

Much of that work is evidenttoday. Warren Exo, who has lived inthe area since the 1960s, still pickswild plums along the Military RidgeTrail west of Riley each autumn.Grape tangles and other brush arestill plentiful along many of thefencerows. The evergreen stands arethe most noticeable. The red pinesare now approaching seventy yearsold, and they tower thirty feet highand more. But the old stands arebreaking up. Deciduous trees such asblack cherry and box elder are creep-ing in under the pine canopies,preparing to replace the older ever-greens.15

Those plantings were what attract-ed many of the farmers to the cooper-ative and kept them involved. “Iknow Dad really liked the plantings,the bushes along the fencerows andthe stands of evergreens,” Rileysaid.16 Over the years, the success ofthose plantings and of the game man-agement efforts would help convince others to join. Forinstance, J. L. Brannan, who rented what would become theSilbernagel farm, was not listed as a farm member in any of theearly Riley documents. By the late 1930s he was included inthe list of members, however, and pheasant kills were record-

ed on the Brannan farm.The Riley Game Cooperative continued, largely through

the will of Aldo Leopold, up until his death. The archives con-tain Leopold’s final “Riley News Letter,” dated April 8, 1948,barely two weeks before he died of a heart attack while fight-

S U M M E R 2 0 0 3 43


Original Riley Game Cooperative fence line along Paulson property.

Joel Heiman photo


S U M M E R 2 0 0 344

ing a brush fire on a neighbor’sfarm next to his beloved Wis-consin River farm. That finalnewsletter is briefer than earlierones, but it still contains awealth of information: Twenty-four hens and five cocks werereleased in 1947, all with alu-minum leg bands. Only tenbirds were killed in 1947, thelowest number since 1933. JayHenderson applied for five hun-dred red pine and white sprucetrees to use as windbreaks. Newstate regulations for shootingpreserves required all birds to beturned loose using the “gentlerelease system”—placing cageswith open doors in the releasearea and allowing the pheasantsto wander out as they chose.17

“Up until he died he kept itgoing,” John Riley said. “Afterthat it just fizzled. He was theonly one from town who reallyworked to keep it going.”18

Roark says that remnants of thecooperative continued until theearly 1960s. “I don’t know whenRiley ceased to be licensed as apreserve, but as best I can tell,my last hunts were in ’61 or’62.”19

Although he moved off the family farm more than a half-century ago, John Riley hasn’t entirely abandoned the com-munity founded by his ancestors. He returns regularly. In theautumn of 2001, a deer hunt in the area provided Riley with alink to the past. On a fence along the boundary of O. Hub’s oldfarm, he found a remnant of the Riley Game Cooperative. Itwas a small, yellow metal sign, about the size of an auto licenseplate that said “Wisconsin Licensed Shooting Preserve.” Oncethose signs were ubiquitous throughout the Riley farm country.“I think people really respected them. They didn’t trespassmuch when they saw those signs,” John said.20

Roark, too, has continued to visit the area, though he rarelyhunts now. “Sometimes I wish I’d ‘kept the faith’ and made aneffort to keep Riley going, if for no other reason than to honorwhat Aldo Leopold and Reuben Paulson had started,” he

said.21 In the late 1980s Roarkattempted a different means ofpreserving Riley, urging theDane County Commissioners toconsider much of the old RileyCooperative farmland for landprotection. His one-man cru-sade met with little initial suc-cess. But in the twenty-firstcentury, it could reap bigrewards, perhaps aided by a giftto the Dane County ParksDepartment to be in the Townof Verona or Riley area.

Jim Mueller, who retired inearly 2002 as a Dane CountyParks Department planner saida variation of Roark’s proposalwas adopted into the county’sparks and open space plan in2001.22 Since then, the Depart-ment of Landscape Architectureat the UW, where Janet Silber-nagel teaches, has partneredwith the Dane County Parks,Natural Heritage Land Trust,and local landowners to studythe landscape ecology and landuse of the Riley area, and to sug-gest conservation strategies thatwill protect the legacy ofLeopold and the Riley GameCooperative. Just as Leopold

used the Riley Cooperative for an outdoor classroom sixtyyears ago, Janet is using it today for her landscape architecturestudents at the University of Wisconsin.

So the legacy survives as far more than some old metal signsrusting in the brush of hidden fences. It is in the fencerowsthemselves, and the brush that has maintained itself throughthe decades. It is in the tall pine groves, like that just to the eastof the former Silbernagel farm. New homes now nestle amongthose stately trees. The cooperative’s legacy is also in thedescendants of those pheasants planted almost seventy yearsago and all of the other species of wildlife that have foundhomes for generations in the cover Aldo Leopold created.

On a winter’s hike around the Riley area, evidence of thoseanimals is abundant. Tracks in the snow indicate that moderninhabitants include not only pheasants but wild turkeys, mice,

R. J. Paulson with white spruce planted in Riley area, believedto be in 1936. In most letters and documents regarding Riley,Leopold referred to his friend as “R. J. Paulson,” but in a few

letters and one article, he is listed as “Reuben Paulson.”



S U M M E R 2 0 0 3 45

1Aldo Leopold, “History of the Riley Game Cooperative, 1931-1939,” in For the Health ofthe Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings (Washington, D.C.: IslandPress, 1999), 176. Originally published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, 1940.2Riley Game Cooperative records, Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin,Department of Wildlife Ecology.3Telephone interview with John Riley, December 2001.4Telephone interview with Gene Roark, January 2002.5Gene Roark, “The Riley Game Co-op,” Dane County Conservation League newsletter, Jan-uary 1987.6John Riley interview.7Roark, “The Riley Game Co-op.”8Quotations from Aldo Leopold, “Helping Ourselves: Being the Adventures of a Farmer anda Sportsman Who Produced Their Own Shooting Ground,” For the Health of the Land, 33-40. Originally published in Field & Stream, 1934.9Telephone interview with Shirley Zwolanek, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources,July 2002.10Letter from Aldo Leopold to Mr. Paul Kelleter, whose title is given only as “Director ofConservation, Madison, Wisconsin.” The letter is dated September 20, 1932, and in itLeopold amends the boundaries of the Riley Shooting Preserve. Riley Game Cooperativerecords, Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin.11Leopold, “Helping Ourselves,” 39, 35.12Riley Game Cooperative records.13 Leopold, “History of the Riley Game Cooperative,” 181–82.14Ibid.15Visit to Riley area with Warren Exo, December 2001.16John Riley interview.17Riley Game Cooperative records.18John Riley interview.19Roark, “The Riley Game Co-op.”20John Riley interview.21Roark, “The Riley Game Co-op.”22Telephone interview with Jim Mueller, January 2002.23Leopold, “History of the Riley Game Cooperative, 180.24Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1949).

rabbits, and coyotes. Ducks and geese still thrivearound the creek and in the marsh. The tracks marksome changes, not only from Leopold’s day, but alsofrom when the authors grew up. Then, wild turkeyswere unheard of. Red foxes were common, but coy-otes were a rarity. Now coyotes are becoming thedominant predators.

But perhaps more than anything, the Riley Coop-erative remains a living monument to Leopold’s beliefthat conservationists can work with local landownersto preserve and restore the natural world. The RileyCooperative, he wrote, “aims to prove that the down-ward trend of wildlife in the dairy belt can be reversedby the combined efforts of farmers and sportsmen,without large expenditures either of cash or land.”23 Itis a pragmatic, let’s-get-down-to-work statement ofLeopold’s ideas for the Riley Cooperative. But thoseideas did not stray from his basic principles of peopleand land, as expressed in his foreword to A SandCounty Almanac: “We abuse land because we regardit as a commodity belonging to us. When we see landas a community to which we belong, we may begin touse it with love and respect.”24

Releasing a trapped pheasant after banding.UW Department of Wildlife Ecology

The AuthorsJanet Silbernagel is a member of thefaculty of Landscape Architecture and theGaylord Nelson Institute for Environmen-tal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches a regional designand conservation studio, along withresearch methods and geographic infor-mation systems. Janet studies the ecologyof cultural landscapes. Her work generally

has direct applications to conservation or ecological design.Currently she has a public design project underway in Middle-ton to reveal nature in an urban setting and is designing an exhi-bition about cultivation along Wisconsin’s Lake Superior region.

Bob Silbernagel and his wife, Judy,abandoned their home state of Wisconsinfor the mountains of Colorado thirty yearsago but return annually to visit the MountHoreb and Madison areas. After studyingjournalism at the University of Wisconsin,Bob began his journalism career in Vail,Colorado. He has been the editorial pageeditor for The Daily Sentinel in Grand

Junction, Colorado, for the past eight years. He is the author ofStalking the Dinosaur Hunters of Western Colorado, publishedby the Museum of Western Colorado and several historicalmagazine articles.

Documents

Pheasant tracks in the snow. According to Aldo Leopold