Jeff Wilson rarely missed a chance to make an encounter with an animal or a human a learning experience. The Iowa farm boy, who made a career out of managing wildlife and advancing ecological research, had a voracious appetite for information about the lives and habitats of wild animals and the knowledge of humans.
In fact, when I met him in 1971, Jeff carried around a notebook. His first question: What’s the best book you ever read?” He recorded your answer for future reference and reading along with quotes and travel tips. He still has that notebook today.
Jeff wrote Wrong Tree about his wildlife journey from the fields of Iowa to the north woods of Wisconsin, and ultimately to far flung locations around the world. His tales involve beaver, bear, osprey, and loon, weaving natural history and science into adventures that will leave you laughing.
He learned something from every animal he raised on his Iowa family farm and the wild animals that live along the fence lines, in the woods and fields.
We both grew up on farms though I was not really a farmer like Jeff, who learned to till the soil from the time he could reach the pedals of a tractor. We both were lucky to be able to run free to nearby creeks, through the woods and listen to the ducks and geese fill the air with the sounds of migration. We hunted pheasants, rabbits and other small game and dreamed of careers in conservation. That’s what brought us to Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. The liberal arts college had just begun a new environmental studies program in the wake of the first Earth Day in 1970.
Northland advertised its new program with pictures of students canoeing on Lake Superior, hunting ducks and fishing. I don’t know what caught Jeff’s eye but I was hooked by the chance to hunt and fish and study wildlife at college. Jeff and I became fast friends and hunted coyotes and deer together, spending hours in his green pick-up truck exploring the back roads of Ashland and Bayfield counties and walking pulp trails and wading through swamps chasing woodcock and grouse.
We took any classes together and shared an admiration for Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson, who Northland named its environmental institute after. These two world class naturalists shaped our own intellectual understanding of nature and wilderness.
But Jeff was different. For most of us even 50 years ago, the diversions of modern life, television, materialism and mass society had shouted out the sights, sounds, and wonders of a life close to nature. For most of us it took a couple of days and physical labor like paddling a canoe across open lakes, sleeping on the ground or getting away from civilization to really understand and appreciate the primitive pleasures of wild places and creatures.
Jeff always had this deep connection of wild things. His sense of awe and wonder was sharp every waking minute. He tuned this relationship with wildness by seeking a hands-on approach to wildlife management and ecological research. Our last class together at Northland was environmental journalism. Our professor, Marianne McGeehan, assigned us to write a column for the Washburn Times, a weekly newspaper in the city across Chequamegon Bay from Ashland.
There we wrote columns about deer management, coyote hunting and other outdoor subjects we were allowed to choose ourselves. The most notable was a story Jeff came up with, to interview two old trappers from Bayfield County he knew.
We connected these woodsmen to the first white men to arrive in northern Wisconsin, Pierre Radisson and Medard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers. They wintered at the head of Chequamegon Bay in 1659 and were colorful trapper who helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company. Steve “Nep” Augustin and Bill Lampella had trapped on the cutover land of the North Woods beginning in the 1930s. They were relics of a past where people lived off the land as loggers, miners trappers and commercial fishermen.
Jeff wrote the first draft ad I did a few minor edits. It was called “Last of a Dying Breed.” Bill explained wolves, then nearly extinct in northern Wisconsin, were far easier to catch than coyotes. That’s why no amount of trapping could eliminate the smaller canids even as wolves had been driven out.
Jeff took a job with the Department of Natural Resources as a wildlife technician. It was the perfect job for the young man who wanted to get his hands on bears, raptors, loons, pine martens and every other animal in his world. He wasn’t looking for a chance to advance in the profession. Instead, he wanted to fill his brain with common sense methods for keeping animals out of trouble and to advance the world’s knowledge of ecology. That led him to come up with some unique approaches to handling skunks, bears and deer.
I chose to become a writer and my first magazine article was in Wisconsin Sportsman Magazine. It was “Last of a Dying Breed.” Jeff generously allowed me to drop his byline on the article. The story convinced the editors to give me a monthly column as Northwest field editor. Thanks to Jeff my career began.
His wild and often amusing lifestyle, captured in his book, shows that he too is the last of a breed. But our movement, environmentalism, is not dying and Jeff offers a beacon for the next generation to preserve its ties to the land.
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