Excerpts from May & June Essays by Aldo Leopold

Here are parts of two more of Aldo Leopold's essays from "A Sand County Almanac", taken from the Illustrated Edition produced by Michael & Denise Sewell and Kenneth Brower, 2001, in conjunction with the Oxford University Press 1949 edition.

MAY - "Back from the Argentine"
When dandelions have set the mark of May on Wisconsin pastures, it is time to listen for the final proof of spring. Sit down on a tussock, cock your ears at the sky, dial out the bedlam of meadowlarks and redwings and soon you may hear it: the flight-song of the upland plover, just now back from the Argentine.
If your eyes are strong, you may search the sky and see him, wings aquiver, circling among the woolly clouds. If your eyes are weak, don't try it: just watch the fence posts. Soon a flash of silver will tell you on which post the plover has alighted and folded his long wings. Whoever invented the word "grace" must have seen the wing-folding of the plover...

Leopold reveals his love of fishing by sharing a trick of dangling his fly from the branch of an alder & allowing the breeze to drop it onto the pool of water above his quarry. A bit of philosophizing comes with the meditations on trout fishing.

JUNE "The Alder Fork --A Fishing Idyl"
...I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world! Did I say a while ago that I waited "for prudence' sake"? That was not so. The only prudence in fishermen is that designed to set the stage for taking yet another, and perhaps a longer, chance"...