October 28, 2026

What Only The Hills Will Know

Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.

Leopold wrote this elegy in 1947 for the dedication of a monument at Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin, marking the extinction of the passenger pigeon, a bird once so numerous its flocks blotted out the sun and the last of which, Martha, had died alone in a zoo in 1914. He was a forester and conservationist who had spent decades watching worn land and vanished species, and he understood that loss does not happen all at once but fades through memory, generation by generation. Writing near the end of his own life, he knew the people who remembered the pigeon were already old, and that soon only the oaks would hold the memory, then only the hills themselves. It is a quiet warning that what we fail to pass on does not simply disappear, it becomes unknowable.