When wildlife researchers and students from around the world converged on Madison in September, several of them made a point to stop by campus to take a look at some of the Aldo Leopold memorabilia on display in the library of the Department of Wildlife Ecology.

The visitors were among about 1,500 who came to Madison to attend the annual meeting of The Wildlife Society. This year”s meeting was hosted by the society”s Wisconsin Chapter, including faculty and staff from the Wildlife Ecology department and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The Department of Wildlife Ecology had its origin in 1933 when the UW-Madison created a Chair in Game Management for Leopold. Six years later, he formed the Department of Wildlife Management, the first academic department in the world ever dedicated specifically to the emerging field of wildlife management.

The Wildlife Society, founded in 1937 with help from Leopold, is an international, non-profit scientific and educational organization representing wildlife professionals in all areas of wildlife conservation and resource management. Its goal is to promote excellence in wildlife stewardship through science and education.

The items on display included field notebooks Leopold used while a professor at the College, his binoculars, wooden bows and arrows he made, and the light meter he used to, among other things, determine the amount of light required to trigger the woodcock”s mating display (“exactly 0.05 foot-candles,” he wrote in the Sky Dance essay in A Sand County Almanac).

The conference”s plenary session was entitled Following Leopold”s Footsteps: Six Decades After A Sand County Almanac. Featured speakers at the session included Leopold”s daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley, Leopold biographer Kurt Meine, and Rick Knight, a wildlife ecologist at Colorado State University who did his graduate work at the College.