Frances Hamerstrom

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…