In Memoriam: A. Starker Leopold

A. STARKER Leopold, conservationist, naturalist, wildlife biologist, and educator, died of a heart attack at his Berkeley, California, home on 23 August 1983. He was born in Burlington, Iowa, on 22 October 1913, to Aldo Leopold and Estella Bergere Leopold. His outstanding achievements in scholarship and conservation paralleled those of his eminent father, who was the dominant figure in the development of scientific wildlife management, a pioneer in the establishment of wilderness areas on U.S. public lands, and the author of "Sand County almanac" and other conservationist literature. This heritage was shared by Starker's younger brothers and sisters; three of them are natural scientists of high reputation; two, like Starker, have been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences. Part of Starker's youth was spent in New Mexico, where his father was employed by the U.S. Forest Service. More than once I heard him reminisce fondly about boyhood duck hunts along the Rio Grande. Later his father accepted a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Starker received his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin in 1936. After 2 yr of graduate study in the Yale School of Forestry he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley and received his Doctor of Philosophy in zoology in 1944. Alden H. Miller was his major professor, and his dissertation research was on the nature of heritable wildness in turkeys (see bibliography). Predoctoral employment included positions as a junior biologist with the U.S. Soil Erosion Service in 1934-1935 and as a field biologist for the Missouri Conservation Commission, 19391944. After he received his Ph.D. he spent 19441946 in Mexico as Director of Field Research for the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union; his long-standing interest in Mexico culminated in 1959 in one of his most important books, "Wildlife of Mexico: the game birds and mammals." In 1946, Starker joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, as Assistant Professor of Zoology and Conservationist, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1952 and to Professor in 1957. In 1958, he was appointed Associate Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and became acting director of M.V.Z. upon the death of Alden Miller in October 1965. Early in 1967, he changed his affiliation to the Department of Forestry and Conservation, where he was Professor of Zoology and Forestry until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1978. Other positions at Berkeley included a long tenure as Director of the Sagehen Creek Field Station (1965-1979) and a term as Assistant to the Chancellor (1960-1963). In 1938 Starker married Elizabeth Weiskotten, when both were students at Berkeley. Elizabeth received her Master of Fine Arts in 1939 and continued to paint and teach painting to many students, in a studio in their Berkeley home. A son, Frederic S. Leopold, was born in 1941 and a daughter, Sarah Leopold Klock, in 1948. Starker Leopold's many and varied professional contributions and accomplishments, and the resulting honors, seem naturally to divide themselves into three main categories: biological science, conservation, and education. Clearly, all three are interrelated, and Starker's contributions epitomize the interrelationships. In fact, a special talent for integrating the three was perhaps his greatest professional strength. Even though publications reporting results of original ornithological research account for a relatively small percentage of the 115 or so titles in his bibliography, they constitute a substantial contribution to knowledge of avian biology, particularly of game birds. Three of those titles stand out as especially important: the 65page 1944 Condor paper on turkeys, based on his dissertation; "Wildlife of Mexico," in which he reviewed literature and reported new findings in accounts of 69 bird species or species groups; and "The California Quail," a recent (1977) detailed treatment of the ecology and management of California's state bird, based on many years of study by himself and a series of his graduate students, one of whom I am proud to be. Each of the latter two works received the Wildlife Publication Award, given annually by