A_Sand_County_Almanac

A Sand County Almanac Book Report: A Sand County Almanac, By Aldo Leopold Brent Dozier Although Leopold’s love of great expanses of wilderness is readily apparent, his book does not cry out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but rather deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, all the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to balanced ecosystems and a sense of quality and wholeness in the landscape. Part I of A Sand County Almanac is devoted to the details of a single piece of land: Leopold’s 120-acre farmed-out farmstead in central Wisconsin, abandoned as a farm years before because of the poor soil from which the "sand counties" took their nickname. It was at this weekend retreat, Leopold says, "that we try to rebuild, with shovel and axe, what we are losing elsewhere". Month by month, Leopold leads the reader through the progression of the seasons with descriptions of such things as skunk tracks, mouse economics, the songs, habits, and attitudes of dozens of bird species, sand, county, leopold, part, land, sand, titled, natural, ethics, ethic, county, because, almanac, things, river, out, first, cycles, book, years, wisconsin, water, through, states, social, says, round, replacing, reader, quality, poor, plants, own, next, music, month, modern, mexico, means, level, leopold’s, landscape, individuals, iii, ii, human, goose, finally, farm, earth, details