Episode 120: The Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin: Highlights of a Study of Counts, Behavior, Turnover, Movement, and Habita

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I wanted to let you in on something before I played.

If you're a long-time listener, you may have noticed a slower pace of episodes this year, and that is because I've been finishing a Memory Pals book that will be out in the world right around this time next year.

You can believe me that I will keep you posted on the official date and the all-important, I am told, pre-sale date and about live shows that I'll be cooking up for the latter part of 2024 to coincide with all of this.

This book is going to feature new stories.

exclusive to the book that I am really proud of and a lot of favorite stories including one we're about to listen to.

If you like the show you will like it and I think it's going to be pretty beautiful.

I am proud of what I have done here.

But it has been a lot of work and it has taken a lot of time.

It is a lot of stories and there are just a ton of moving parts that I am literally now as I am approaching deadline day in a few weeks just constantly rejiggering and stacking and all the stuff.

It's going to be done very soon like in a handful of weeks and all of this to say A

Thanks for your patience and your continued support of the show.

B get excited about the book.

I am.

C there's going to be a new story in a couple weeks, but D,

this one is an old favorite of mine.

I'm putting it in the feed right now because I just had the great pleasure of emailing back and forth with the daughter of the subject of the story as part of the book writing process.

And it has really been lovely and meaningful to me.

And she's also very kindly offered me something that I have never gotten before, which is a fact check from a blood relative.

And if you stick around to the end of the story, I will set the record straight in the credits.

So here is the prairie chicken in Wisconsin.

Highlights of a study of counts, behavior, turnover, movement, and habitat.

This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

There was the time when Frances was seven and told her mother that she wanted to plant a garden behind their big brick mansion in the woods outside Boston.

And her mother said, of course, gardening was a fine pastime for a girl, but Fran, she said, the girl's name was pronounced with the moneyed mid-Atlantic accent of a Catherine Hepburn or George Plimpton or Mrs.

Howell from Gilligan's Island.

But Fran, her mother said,

the staff will dig the holes.

Your job as somebody who will someday run a household is to instruct the help as to where you'd like to plant the flowers and how.

And then later, if you'd like to cut some of those flowers for an arrangement to...

Brighten up the parlor, to bring some cheer to the landing and the grand staircase.

Why by all means, enjoy.

Just be sure to wear a proper pair of white gloves to keep your hands free of dirt.

But Frances loved the dirt.

Loved bugs and birds and tadpoles.

Her mother once nearly fainted when one of the servants poured out ice water for lemonade for a lady's luncheon and found that Frances had put baby frogs in the pitcher and they were flitting about between the cubes.

And all of this drove her mother crazy.

But Frances said fine, and she told the gardeners where to put the begonias as her mother smiled in approval at her proper little girl.

And then she made a secret garden, dug holes with her bare hands, collected the insects she'd unearthed, put them in jars, pinned them and labeled them, planted rhododendrons so she could hide beneath them if anyone came looking for her.

And then to be extra safe, she planted a wall of poison ivy around it.

She was immune to it.

So no one would ever bother her there.

There was the day she went to the dentist, and for a treat, her governess took her to the Natural History Museum.

And she saw all of those insects and arachnids mounted and labeled with names Frances hadn't known, species she'd had pinned at home but couldn't identify.

And she loved it, and she cried when it was time to go, until the governess promised her she'd take her again the next time she went to the dentist.

And there was the night the following week, when Frances took a pencil.

and poked at her gums until they were all gross and inflamed.

And her parents were alarmed and they told her she'd have to go right back to the dentist.

And then they couldn't figure out for the life of them why she was smiling.

There were all those nights when she'd wait for everyone to fall asleep and she'd slip out her bedroom window and head out across the grass, blue in the moonlight, and lay beneath the stars and fall asleep to the sound of the night until she was awoken by the dawn.

And she'd hustle back home before anyone knew she'd been gone.

And there was the time, some time before that, she she was about five, when her family was on a grand tour of Germany and a famous actress, some beautiful stage star, came to visit and lit up a cigarette, flouting Frances' father's strict rules against smoking in the house.

And Frances was sure her dad was going to go ballistic, but instead he scrambled to find an ashtray.

And there was the time when, at 84, and looking back at her life, When Frances would remember how she became determined to be so famous one day that she she could make her own rules so she wouldn't have to hide how odd she was, how unlike other people.

Few people, she'd write, really held her attention.

It was birds and mammals and reptiles and insects that filled her dreams.

There were those Saturdays, nine years of Saturdays, in the ballroom at the Milton Club learning to dance and all that went with it.

The entrances and exits, the curtsies and steps, how to hold one's head and his hand, where to look, where not to look, how to twirl but not too fast, how to smile but not too wide, all to prepare for a future of balls and cotillions as the wife of a diplomat or of a man who owned factories, but no one would ask her to dance.

There were more girls than boys, and the boys didn't quite know what to make of her.

And so she sat on the wall and watched and waited.

There were all those times she'd go to the secret garden and be alone with the things she would hide away there.

The sick animals she was trying to nurse back to health.

Her cigarettes.

Her rifle and ammunition.

And she would dream of Africa and the Amazon.

And there was the night she had to tell her father she'd flunked out of Smith College.

She couldn't be bothered to be interested in things that weren't interesting.

And so she needed to get a job, but the only thing they'd prepared her to do was wearing dresses.

So she got work as a model.

There was the night she went dancing.

She was 20.

Boys wanted to dance with her then.

Especially when she wore her red velvet dress.

And one young man in particular, tall and handsome, came up and talked to her.

Told her how he wanted to be a scientist, a naturalist, wanted to study animals in Africa.

And she asked him if he wanted to get out of there.

And they went down to the beach.

to the pier where people like them didn't go, with the honky-tonks and the hot dog stands and the place where they spun sugar into cotton candy and they wound up at this joint with a band that played jazz.

They had never heard jazz before.

But they found the rhythm and they danced all night.

And Frances thanked the band leader on her way out.

Told him this had been the best night of her life.

And there was the night, three days after Frederick Hammerstrom had seen her in the red velvet dress, that he asked Frances to marry him.

And she asked what took him so long.

And there was the time that his grad school advisor said there was a job working with animals for both he and Francis.

Not in Africa or the Amazon.

Not like they'd hoped.

But Wisconsin.

To study the prairie chicken.

So then there was the day that they showed up in an abandoned farmhouse in the woods in the upper Midwest in the middle of winter and our high heels clacked in the frozen ground.

And there were all the mornings when they'd start a fire and wait for the room to get above freezing.

and celebrate if it was warm enough so they wouldn't see their breath.

There were days when they'd go out looking for the prairie chicken, study its ways, days upon days, seasons after seasons.

There were the nights that she'd practice curtseying in the old tantique mirror in their frozen farmhouse to see if she still remembered.

And the days she'd read letters from home, from her mother reminding her how to set a table when they were entertaining guests.

asking if she should send more dessert forks, and Frances would laugh at how much her life had changed.

There was the night that the pump froze and there wasn't any well water and not enough snow to melt to drink or to wash and they needed more fuel for the fire and so she soaked her red velvet gown in kerosene

and threw it on the logs and knew in that moment that her old life was over for good

and good riddance.

And there were the 21 years that Frances and Fred studied the Wisconsin prairie chicken.

Struggled to understand why they were all dying off, why they were on the brink of extinction, when they weren't being hunted like buffalo or passenger pigeon.

21 years of counting them and making notes and hosting grad students and volunteers, sometimes dozens at a time, who'd marvel at Francis and Fred, and how they seemed one with each other and one with the land, and immune to the cold and to boredom.

And the visitors would go wide-eyed when Francis would show them her curtsy, or would recall some cotillion or tell some strange story of society life that seemed a whole other life entirely.

There were nights when the wind would howl and scare their two children, born to fine families but born to the prairie.

There were days when they couldn't believe how fast they were growing, and how happy they were all there out in the wild.

There was the time when Fred's doctor told Frances her husband had pancreatic cancer.

And the day not long after when he died.

And there were the times she read tributes to her husband, and to the work they did together.

How it had saved the prairie chicken.

How the two of them were the people who figured out that extinction didn't just come from overhunting,

but could be caused by habitat depletion.

Figured out that the prairie chicken needed the prairie itself to survive.

That all of its creatures, Bugs and its grasses, its birds and its trees and its creeks that froze over.

All of it.

All the countless little things that combine somehow somehow to give this species life.

And there were trips, at 90 years old, down the Amazon into Africa, a few years before she died, when Frances would listen to the night and think of her husband and their 59 years together, and of her life before, and the choices big and small, and the days unmarked or wholly remarkable.

The times remembered and lost, all the countless little moments that combine somehow to make a life.

And she fell asleep beneath the stars.

This episode of The Memory Pals was written and produced by me in 2018.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia, a collection of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

If you want to support the work that the show does and the very special work that Radiotopia does, building a more equitable and stable industry, a place where artists get to make the shows they want to make on their own terms, go to radiotopia.fm slash donate.

Thank you very much.

And as I mentioned at the top of this episode, I have, as part of the book process, been emailing with Frances Hamberson's daughter Elva, who has been incredibly kind and it really has been a delight to connect with her.

She's been helpful in digging up some photos of her mom

and I have been really touched to have this personal connection with the daughter of a woman I really admire.

But anyway,

she flagged a couple of things.

One is incredibly embarrassing, and I will tell you right now, that in doing the artwork for this episode, I originally accidentally used,

and I've since gone back and it is so insane, but I don't feel that badly about it because I realized how it happened and something was mislabeled, which was not my fault, but the thing that was my fault, but still I'm not sure it was that difficult of a mistake to make.

I used a picture of Rachel Carson, who looks exactly like her mom.

I mean, not exactly.

But when you are scrolling through pictures on the web,

it's pretty remarkable.

You can really find a a couple where you're like oh that's the same person but it is not the same person

and it was super embarrassing oh god to uh

have her say that's not my mother that's rachel carson

but she did it very kindly the other fact check which i found really interesting

was that the part of the story

where she burns the dress to heat the house.

And I'll admit it is a subtle distinction, but it is an important one, and that is that she burned the dress, not to heat the house directly,

but to thaw the pump that would allow water

into the house.

So the spirit of

the spirit of the act is right there.

But for the record, when Frances Hermistrom burned that beautiful red velvet gown.

to facilitate her new life so distant from the one she left behind.

It was to make water flow,

not to heat the house.

A new story in a couple weeks.

Thanks.

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