Frances Hamerstrom
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Frances "Fran" Hamerstrom (December 17, 1907 - August 29, 1998) was an American author and naturalist famous for her work with the Wisconsin Prairie Grouse (also known as the Prairie Chicken and Prairie Marmot).
[edit] Biography
The daughter of a socialite and an international criminologist, she was born Frances Flint in Boston in 1907. In 1931, she married Frederick Hamerstrom, a famed wildlife researcher, in Orlando, Florida. They had two marriage ceremonies; this first one (in Florida) was the result of Frederick and "Fran" (pronounced "Fron", as in "pond fronds") being stopped by the police and Frederick being accused of violating the Mann Act. A second, high-society, "out East" wedding was staged for the benefit of her parents, a few months later.
Fran Hamerstrom, the only female graduate student of ecologist and A Sand County Almanac author Aldo Leopold, was a prolific writer herself. She published over 100 professional papers and 10 books on the prairie chicken, harrier, eagle and other wildlife topics, some translated (by Fran herself) into the German language. Although raised to become the wife of a diplomat, she early on developed a fascination with the natural world. Despite her clan's constant complaint that such behavior was "unladylike," she kept wild pets at her family's ancestral home at Boston and became a world-class hunter. To keep her family from uncovering evidence of her wildlife adventures, she planted poison ivy along the path which led to where she kept her wilderness gear. (Fran was naturally immune from its effects).
Arriving with her always unflappable, ever-studious husband, Frederick ("Hammy" to his friends), Fran moved to Wisconsin in the 1940s. The Hamerstroms first landed work at a wildlife refuge in Necedah, Wisconsin. Their major contribution in research, however, was a lifetime study of the endangered prairie chicken in a research area nearby their 1850s-era, Plainfield, Wisconsin, home, an elegantly designed bit of pre-Civil War architecture that was never painted and lacked indoor plumbing. To "unfreeze" a water pump during their first year at this isolated place, Fran set fire to one of her Boston ballgowns.
Research completed by the Hamerstroms — suggesting that the prairie chicken required a "checkerboard" pattern of habitat, spread across many acres of land throughout central Wisconsin, to escape the fate of the passenger pigeon — is credited by naturalists worldwide for saving the prairie chicken from expiration. Tens of thousands of wildlife observers participated in the collection of necessary data for this project, with Fran playing host to all of them at her home. Fran and Hammy also conducted a decades' long, Plainfield, Wisconsin, study of the American Kestrel.
As a writer, Fran Hamerstrom's reputation rests on a lifetime of popularizing meticulously researched science for general readers. Among her books are Walk When the Moon is Full, Is She Coming Too? Memoirs of a Lady Hunter, An Eagle to the Sky, and My Double Life.
She was also well known for her artistry as a cook, publishing a wild game cookbook near the end of her life. As a lecturer and storyteller, Hamerstrom's abilities were rarely matched and never bested. Her spare prose was elegant and surprising, always pushing her readers to flip to the next page and the next chapter. By training hundreds of research assistants (nicknamed "gabboons") and by writing formal scientific papers and informal books, Fran and her husband inspired thousands of young people to dedicate their lives to science and to public service.
Following Frederick Hamerstrom's death in 1990, Fran became a world traveler. She investigated the natural world in places as far flung as Saudi Arabia, Africa and South America. She was robbed at knife point during an Amazon boat trip and had her hearing aid stolen by a gorilla in Africa. Many of these Hamerstrom tales were shared with readers of the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune in central Wisconsin, thanks to Fran's friend and fellow writer, Mark Scarborough.
After being tenderly cared for at her Plainfield home by her friend, the artist Deann De La Ronde, Fran Hamerstrom died at a nearby Port Edwards, Wisconsin, nursing home that summer, following a pitched battle with cancer, after a full 90 years of adventure.
