A. Starker Leopold

Leopold served as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for thirty years within the Zoology, Conservation, and Forestry departments.

[1] As a result of his father's employment by the United States Forest Service, Starker spent his early childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[3] As Starker spent his early boyhood fishing on the Rio Grande River and hunting in the oak and prairie country of Madison, Wisconsin, he learned to feel secure in nature from a young age.

[2] Another critical experience that developed Starker's mindset and opinions on nature was a guided hunting trip in northern Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountain system with his brother Carl and father Aldo in the winter of 1937 - 1938.

Starker experienced an ecosystem untouched by humans, with all its processes intact, which allowed him to gain insight into the beneficial and essential roles predators and frequent low-burning fire play in wilderness landscapes.

[6] With the help of professors, Joseph Grinnell and Alden H. Miller, and his specific interest in ornithology, he completed his dissertation research on the nature of heritable wildness in turkeys.

Being an expert on population irruption, ecosystems, and hunting, Leopold understood that implementing management methods in National Parks was required to approach this issue.

[10] In 1964, the Advisory Board and Leopold scrutinized the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's Branch of Predatory and Rodent Control for excessive killing of animals that have not caused damage or danger to the public.

[10] Starkers' advisor role for the National Park Service continued when he chaired a 1969 meeting of the Natural Sciences Advisory Committee to discuss grizzly bear management at Yellowstone.

[11] In addition to the more than 100 scientific papers he authored, Leopold wrote five books during his life, he was working on a sixth at the time of his death.

His research and authorship, as seen in the use of the Leopold Report, profoundly shaped the current views of the role of human presence in the management of nature.