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Natural Wonders

July 28th, 2026

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More adventures with the Hamerstroms; I’m reading from My Double Life; Memoirs of a Naturalist by Frances Hamerstrom. 

The focus today is the work they did feeding, housing and teaching  volunteers (‘boomers’) who arrived at their farm house each spring  to watch and document the mating activity of the prairie chickens. These boomers provided data to the research for decades. 

This is one of 10 books Fran wrote and they give insights into the hard work and ingenuity it took (and still takes) to be ground breaking wildlife researchers. They were students of Aldo Leopold.