A Sand County Almanac - Key Vocabulary & Concepts

Vocabulary terms, key entities, and ecological concepts extracted from Aldo Leopold's essays in A Sand County Almanac.

Thinking Like a Mountain

Aldo Leopold's ecological concept of understanding the long-term, interconnected balance of an ecosystem, such as appreciating the vital role of apex predators like wolves in preventing overgrazing by deer.

Tyro

A novice or beginner who lacks the sensitivity or knowledge to sense the presence, absence, or ecological significance of wildlife such as wolves.

Extirpate

To root out, eliminate, or exterminate completely, used in reference to states destroying their native wolf populations.

Escudilla

A prominent mountain in Arizona that dominated the local horizon and was formerly defined by the presence of a famous grizzly bear.

Old Bigfoot

A famous grizzly bear on Escudilla mountain, characterized as a robber-baron who killed one cow a year before being slain by a government trapper's set-gun.

Numenon

The imponderable, inner ecological essence of material things that gives a landscape its living significance, standing in contradistinction to phenomenon.

Phenomenon

The ponderable and predictable physical aspects of material objects, contrasted with the deeper, imponderable essence known as numenon.

Guacamaja

The native Mexican term for the Thick-billed Parrot of the Sierra Madre, described by Leopold as the numenon of that mountain range.

El tigre

The great jaguar of the Colorado River Delta whose pervasive presence kept all other living creatures in a state of watchful alertness.

Cachinilla

A tall, spear-like shrub that grows in dense, impenetrable thickets in the Delta of the Colorado River.

Tidal bore

A feared wall of water that surges up the Colorado River from the Gulf of California during certain incoming tides.

Alexander Pattie

An explorer who died in 1829 of thirst, exhaustion, and mosquitoes on the great salt desert while attempting to cross the Delta to California.

Calabasillas

Wild melons growing on the mudflats of the Colorado River Delta whose exposed seeds fed deer, raccoons, doves, and quail.

Rio Gavilan

A river in Mexico known for its musical waters and for representing a vast, pulsing ecological harmony across the landscape.