Mr. Cory Woods’ Mountain Ecology students discussed the introduction to A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold with volunteer Virginia Master Naturalist Bill Henry who is a former high school teacher with a strong interest in the outdoors and ecology.  The students will be reading selections from the book throughout the course of the year specifically reading each successive month of his observations on his farm in Wisconsin as a guide for their weekly observations at BRS and on the Interpretive Trail.  They covered Leopold and several other naturalists and conversationalists, and conservation organizations to set the stage in the first weeks of the Mountain Ecology course.  Each student’s field journal will be a collection of weekly observations and interpretations that are guided by reading books such as A Sand County Almanac.  The other major influence will be The Forest Unseen by David Haskell. Haskell studies a one by one meter plot of land on the Sewanee: The University of the South campus in Tennessee each week for a year and discusses the ecology and biology of what he observes in his plot. The students in Mountain Ecology will eventually have their own one by one plot on the Interpretive Trail to do the same.