Labor Day weekend always marks a rite of passage for students. Some are headed for Techs or A&Ms, whilst others seek more isolated environs. One’s pickup truck will be crammed with clothes, a stereo and books, while the other’s has shotgun shells, an ice chest and a deer feeder. And whether one’s campus is in an institution of higher learning, or just a higher position (i.e., a tower deer blind), there are similarities among fraternities at each.

The first might be freshman orientation. For a country boy like me, the thought of going from a senior high graduating class of 42 to a campus with over 5000 students was gut-wrenching. Never mind that the campus at Southwest Oklahoma State University would be swallowed whole by a behemoth like Texas A&M. Freshman orientation is your first chance to see just how strange folks from the big city are, and what weird customs they have. See any similarities about how you perceive metroplex hunters bedecked in camo accented with a Bowie knife?

Then there’s the course catalog. You can forget about most of the courses that look interesting, as they’re already filled by the time you get to enroll. Your first year will be replete with the various "101s" and you’ll be lucky to get a lecturer who even speaks the same dialect as you do. At times you wonder if this place is out to help you, or out to get you. Labs and quizzes, reports and minutia. But, if you stay focused and work hard, soon things begin to line out and you learn to negotiate the hurdles of academia.

It’s been 25 years since my freshman orientation, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s to try and keep education simple. While latin names and various "-ologies" have their place on the campus, simplicity and common sense have tenure on the back forty. Keep your philosophies simple, your jargon country-fied, and above all, enjoy your work. The enthusiasm may prove contagious.

In 1978 I was introduced to the writings of Aldo Leopold, who we in wildlife circles revere as the "father" of wildlife management. Now here’s a guy with whom I could relate, even if I did have to consult a dictionary every so often to look up a term. His writings made pleasurable readings, and had meat on the bone. His 1933 classic, "Game Management," has earned biblical status for wildlife managers and his collection of essays, "A Sand County Almanac," (published in 1948) are to biologists what "The Time It Never Rained" has become to Kelton-philiacs.

Chapter 1 of "Game Management" has a quote that I recite often when speaking with landowners about wildlife management: "Game can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have heretofore destroyed it; the axe, plow, cow, fire and gun."

As land, livestock and wildlife managers, it behooves us to understand these basic tools and the framework (i.e., applied ecology) in which they operate.

Leopold’s "axe" meant timber management to him, but I extend it to brush management for those of us dealing with rangelands. In Texas, brush control is the single most important land management decision that affects the density and diversity of wildlife, in my opinion. And while fence-to-fence control hamstrings wildlife habitat, the planned, selective control of brush (e.g., Brush Sculptors) is indeed one of the best ways of manipulating habitat.

The plow in Leopold’s time had caused widespread open wounds to much of the Great Plains, and in the 1930s we reaped the price for such error. I use the "plow" to talk about practices like reseeding, CRP, and disking to stimulate forbs for quail. Same tool, but operating at different scales.

The cow in Leopold’s vernacular remains virtually unchanged. Leopold had seen arid rangelands and tallgrass prairies hopelessly overstocked, whether from ignorance or greed. And while much of Texas’ rangelands are still overstocked, we have learned to use planned, controlled grazing as one of the best tools for managing plant succession. Today we know how to use cows (and other livestock) as self-sustaining (and sometimes profitable) means for creating the patchwork of herbaceous species that promote a diversity of wildlife. Granted, that knowledge is not always empowered on the back forty.

Leopold’s inclusion of "fire" must have really seemed like blasphemy to resource managers of his era. Indeed, it would take another 40 years before foresters talked seriously about restoring the use of fire as a tool in forest (or range) management. But he knew that fire did have a place and that we just had to determine where and when that place was.

And last, there was the gun. Whether Leopold was referring to the need for population control of ungulates (e.g., deer and elk), or forecasting the significance of hunting-generated revenues (i.e., the Pittman-Robertson Act) as a means of funding wildlife conservation, I cannot say. But by rallying a conservation ethic in landowners and sportsmen, he helped to ensure that there would always be wild places.

Leopold’s writings have provided me with an ad libitum supply of "silver bullets." Whether it’s his chiding that "the urge to comprehend must precede the urge to reform," or his admonition that "to keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering," he makes me do something that I hope to get my students to do likewise —Think.

There’ll be an opportunity for thinking at an upcoming field day sponsored by the Texas Section, Society for Range Management and the Texas Chapter, The Wildlife Society. Entitled "Range Management 101: a primer for livestock and wildlife managers," this all-day tour of ranches will hone in on Leopold’s concepts of the axe, plow, cow, fire and gun, and how these tools can be applied to enhance wildlife and livestock production from Central Texas rangelands. For more information about the field day, go to the TEXNAT website (http://texnat.tamu.edu), or call Tamara Trail (915-653-4576) or Ellis Klett (915-869-5141).

It will be my opportunity to open the day’s lesson with a short talk that I call "In Search of Camouflaged Cowboy Hats." My jargon will be country-fied; my philosophies simple; my metaphors meaningful; my silver bullets largely Leopold, sweetened perhaps with some by my main man Will Rogers.

And participants will have but one assignment for the rest of the day ... to think! Hope to see you there.