I first met Dr Charles M Kirkpatrick a couple years after I graduated high school. I was at Purdue for a day on campus, registering for classes. Kirk, as he was known to colleagues and friends, was sitting behind a desk in the old Ag Annex Building. He was lean, white-haired, and wore a scowl befitting a man bored with the prospect of signing up another new student. He sat quietly, reviewing my paperwork. “Greensburg Indiana,” he said, making eye contact. “My home town.”
I’m not sure it meant much to him, but it did to me. I had never met someone schooled as a wildlife professional, and did not expect my first to be someone intimately familiar with a tree growing from a courthouse tower in Decatur County. He had to know Sand Creek, the way it brushed the edge of town before meandering south and west to merge with the White River. Maybe, in a newly fallen snow, he’d found a fresh fox track where the creek passed under the railroad, and followed ole Reynard half a day as I had. He’d be familiar with Cobbs Fork and its limestone bottom, perfect for wading and looking for salamanders. Perhaps he’d thrown spinners to smallmouth bass in Clifty Creek where they held tight against the bridge abutment on the Vandalia Road, and hunted squirrels in the rolling oak-hickory woodlands east and south of town. I reasoned that the experiences that led me to this campus likely influenced him as well, and I felt a kinship with the man and a confidence I had come to the right place.
In high school I focused on industrial arts and worked part time as an electrician to get me out of the classroom. I was not college material. Then two weeks before graduating I walked into the office of Miss Risk, my guidance counselor, and said, “I want to study wildlife science.” “I know,” she said, smiling. Geneva Risk was a seasoned professional who had counseled my dad a generation before, and knew what students wanted sometimes before they did. She laid out a plan for evening courses at a nearby technical school where I would pick up math, economics, and other classes Purdue required.
I wouldn’t have C.M. Kirkpatrick as a class instructor until my junior and senior years but would stop in his office occasionally, maybe to appease my home sickness. He was editor of The Journal of Wildlife Management, a technical publication with the latest findings in wildlife research, and was a stickler for proper verbiage, both written and spoken. I was a lad with little respect for either. At one of my visits he abruptly asked, “If two Fords are traveling single file down the highway, what time is it?” I hadn't the faintest idea. “Tin after tin,” he said. It was a joke, but its purpose was to have me listen to myself and my hillbilly lingo. “It’s ten, not tin; get, not git.” He wore professionalism and integrity like a well tailored shirt, and would subtly and patiently demonstrate to a group of backwoods students that there was infinitely more to his science than a love of hunting and fishing.
I can picture him now walking the aisles of the classroom, handing out a freshly mimeographed lesson, his brow furrowed. He approaches a girl who is not yet my wife and their eyes meet. She’s intimidated, but reflexively offers him a Milk Dud. He gladly accepts.
I came to learn he suffered from frequent migraines and wondered if they explained the scowl he often wore, but there was rarely a time he would not break into a smile and chuckle given the slightest incentive. It would happen as we reminisced about squirrel hunts. “Amazing, how vivid the memories,” he once reflected, “the details of particularly difficult shots.” It happened anytime we spoke of home turf and families, or the north country, or the Rocky Mountains of the west.
His specialty was wildlife physiology and he had studied under the tutelage of the great Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin, the man who said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds… (He) sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” Leopold’s science-based revelation that healthy ecosystems require top predators and his philosophical insights of a land ethic encompassing all living things earned him worldwide acclaim.
Kirk was among the fortunate to know Leopold personally. When Aldo’s beloved dog, Gus, was accidentally shot on a bird hunt, it was Kirk who drove the car to the vet, a distraught Aldo in the backseat, a wounded dog on his lap. “Gus, you poor goddamned dog,” Aldo repeated over and over. Kirk’s admiration for Leopold’s tenets and values would guide him for life, as they continue to guide and inspire today.
When C.M. Kirkpatrick was offered the opportunity to develop a wildlife science program at Purdue, he quickly accepted and set the university on course to become a leader in preparing students for careers as biologists, researchers, and naturalists. The undergraduate curriculum he designed and implemented was topped off with a senior year I never wanted to end. Ornithology, mammalogy, ichthyology, wildlife ecology— what not to love?
Maybe it was the natural consequence of his aging, the decades of discouraging environmental observations and experiences that wore him down, but it seemed Kirk’s hope for a healthy and viable future for the resource he dedicated his life to was waning. Wildlife would always be tertiary to agriculture and industry and the whims of civilized man. The loss of wetlands and critical habitats was ongoing despite their intrinsic value and proven necessity for a healthy planet. Once, while gazing across a section of native prairie turned cropland, he said, mostly to himself, “A cottontail would have to pack a lunch to cross that field.” At Purdue, he’d be approached by ag industry leaders concerned that damage from wildlife was threatening their livestock operations or field crops. Rarely was there space for compromise, for consideration of harmonious existence. When my wife and I finished grad school, Kirk came to visit and to meet our first born son, and we joked that Jacob was destined to be a biologist. Kirk set his eyes on the boy and lamented, “There won’t be any wildlife when you grow up.” Jacob turned 42 this year, and the sixth great extinction is well underway.
In our senior year we were given an assignment to produce a polished scientific report on a particular species, including life history, past and current research, special concerns, etc.. To avoid bias in grading, Kirk required all reports to be identified only by the author's social security number. Sometime later, I was in his office and the topic of reports came up. “Which one was yours?” he asked. “Sharp-tailed grouse,” I replied. Wearing a wry smile and tugging the front of my shirt, he said, “Don’t ever stop writing.”
I could have come clean and told him my wizard roommate had voluntarily dissected my report and made it what it was, but I didn’t. But neither did I take CMK’s words lightly. He made me want to be a better writer. I’m still working on it, his memory urging me on.
Leopold said, “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.” In the introduction to his book, A Sand County Almanac, he wrote, “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
In reality, humanity can’t exist without the elaborate interconnections and collaborations among wild things, but not everyone agrees or understands, and our collective behaviors and actions have resulted in a planet whose environmental systems are collapsing. We need mentors to help us anticipate and navigate the consequences. I’m glad CMK was mine.
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