Frances Hamerstrom Spent 40 Years Restoring the Greater Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin — Starting With 50 Birds. She Was One of the First Women Field Biologists in America. She Banded Raptors Into Her 80s. Almost Nobody Knows Her Name.
She restored a species with 50 birds and 40 years of stubbornness. History almost forgot to write it down.Frances Hamerstrom — born 1907, died 1998 — was one of the first women to earn a graduate degree in wildlife management in the United States, studying under Aldo Leopold (the father of American conservation). She was denied academic positions for decades because she was a woman. She worked in Wisconsin anyway.Her focus: the Greater Prairie Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) — a grouse species of tallgrass prairie that had declined to approximately 50 birds in Wisconsin by the 1950s as prairie habitat was converted to cropland.Her method: she and her husband Frederick (also a biologist) took up residence in rural Wisconsin farmland — in conditions that contemporary colleagues described as spartan — and began studying the booming grounds (breeding display sites) of the remaining birds. Over 40 years, she: mapped all booming grounds in the state, worked with landowners to protect them, managed prairie habitat restoration, and built a population management framework that grew the Wisconsin Greater Prairie Chicken population from ~50 to thousands.She simultaneously banded thousands of raptors — contributing data to long-term hawk population studies across North America. She continued fieldwork into her 80s.She wrote 10 books, including “Strictly for the Chickens” — a memoir about her fieldwork that blends science with wry humor. She won numerous awards, none of the most prominent ones.Her name: not in most conservation textbooks.
When a scientist spends 40 years restoring a species from 50 individuals to thousands — and history still doesn’t widely know her name — what does that tell us about who gets to be remembered?
Steve was a fan.