On this SlideShare page, you will find several Power Point presentations, one for each of the most popular essays to read aloud from A Sand County Almanac at Aldo Leopold Weekend events. Each presentation has the essay text right on the slides, paired with beautiful images that help add a visual element to public readings. Dave Winefske (Aldo Leopold Weekend event planner from Argyle, Wisconsin) gets credit for putting these together. Thanks Dave!

A note on images within the presentations: we have only received permission to use these images within these presentations, as part of this event. You will see a photo credit slide as the last image in every presentation. Please be sure to show that slide to your audience at least once, and if you don't mind leaving it up to show at the end of each essay, that is best. Also please note that we do not have permission to use these images outside of Aldo Leopold Weekend reading event presentations. For example, the images that come from the Aldo Leopold Foundation archive are not “public domain,” yet we see unauthorized uses of them all the time on the internet. So, hopefully that’s enough said on this topic—if you have any questions, just let us know. mail@aldoleopold.org

If you download these presentations to use in your event, feel free to delete this intro slide before showing to your audience.

The Choral Copse

By September, the day breaks with little help from birds. A song sparrow may give a single half-hearted song, a woodcock may twitter overhead en route to his daytime thicket,

a barred owl may terminate the night's argument with one last wavering call, but few other birds have anything to say or sing about.

It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn daybreaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail.

The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come. After a brief minute or two, the music closes as suddenly as it began.

There is a peculiar virtue in the music of elusive birds. Songsters that sing from top-most boughs are easily seen and as easily forgotten; they have the mediocrity, of the obvious.

What one remembers is the invisible hermit thrush pouring silver chords from impenetrable shadows; the soaring crane trumpeting from behind a cloud;

the prairie chicken booming from the mists of nowhere;

the quail's Ave Maria in the hush of dawn.

No naturalist has even seen the choral act, for the covey is still on its invisible roost in the grass, and any attempt to approach automatically induces silence.

In June it is completely predictable that the robin will give voice when the light intensity reaches 0.01 candle power, and that the bedlam of other singers will follow in predictable sequence.

In autumn, on the other hand, the robin is silent and it is quite unpredictable whether the covey-chorus will occur at all.

The disappointment I feel on these mornings of silence perhaps shows that things hoped for have a higher value than things assured. The hope of hearing quail is worth half a dozen risings-in-the-dark.

My farm always has one or more coveys in autumn, but the daybreak chorus is usually distant.

I think this is because the coveys prefer to roost as far as possible from the dog, whose interest in quail is even more ardent than my own.

One October dawn, however, as I sat sipping coffee by the outdoor fire, a chorus burst into song hardly a stone's throwaway.

They had roosted under a white-pine copse, possibly to stay dry during the heavy dews.

We felt honored by this daybreak hymn sung almost at our doorstep.

Somehow the blue autumnal needles on those pines became thenceforth bluer, and the red carpet of dewberry under those pines became even redder.

Photo Credits• Historic photographs: Aldo Leopold Foundation archives

• A Sand County Almanac photographs by Michael Sewell

• David Wisnefske, Sugar River Valley Pheasants Forever, Wisconsin Environmental Education Board, Wisconsin Environmental Education Foundation, Argyle Land Ethic Academy (ALEA)

• UW Stevens Point Freckmann Herbarium, R. Freckmann, V.Kline, E. Judziewicz, K. Kohout, D. Lee, K Sytma, R. Kowal, P. Drobot, D. Woodland, A. Meeks, R. Bierman

• Curt Meine, (Aldo Leopold Biographer)

• Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Environmental Education for Kids (EEK)

• Hays Cummins, Miami of Ohio University

• Leopold Education Project, Ed Pembleton

• Bird Pictures by Bill Schmoker

• Pheasants Forever, Roger Hill

• Ruffed Grouse Society

• US Fish and Wildlife Service and US Forest Service

• Eric Engbretson

• James Kurz

• Owen Gromme Collection

• John White & Douglas Cooper

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

• Ohio State University Extension, Buckeye Yard and Garden Online

• New Jersey University, John Muir Society, Artchive.com, and Labor Law Talk