BOOK REVIEWS 
One reason why we are able to read this book at all is that the author came of 
age in the last years of the era in which wildlife jobs were available to people without 
college degrees. Marshall got his degree from Oregon State University at exactly the 
time when people with degrees were starting to enter the wildlife refuges’ workforce 
in significant numbers after World War II. This meant that Marshall was hired at a 
very young age into jobs where he suddenly had more significant responsibilities than 
an entry-level person would have today. In short, he grew up with the refuge system 
and it grew up in part owing to his work. 
Dave Marshall was a “kid birder” in Portland, Oregon, where he had unique access 
to figures such as Stanley Jewett ( Birds of Oregon, 1940; Birds of Washington State, 
1953), Ira Gabrielson (Birds of Oregon-, Birds of Alaska, 1959), nature photogra- 
pher/writer William L. Finley, and noted bird illustrator Bruce Horsfall. Along with a 
few boyhood friends, he developed the habit of birding northwest Oregon by bicycle 
after age 12, something that most parents would not allow, but his did. These birder 
kids of the late 1930s crossed the Cascade Range by bicycle when they were about 
15, carrying camping gear, and ranged at large throughout the Portland area and the 
northern Willamette Valley, finding all manner of birds. 
At age 17 in 1943, Marshall got a job as a fire lookout in the Fremont National 
Forest of southern Oregon, as did his friend Tom McAllister. They kept careful bird 
notes, and when Jewett suggested that they submit an article to the Auk, to their 
astonishment it was accepted. They were 18 years old, and shortly thereafter Marshall 
joined the Army Air Force, where he was trained as a B-17 ball-turret gunner and 
flew in several missions over Europe. One of the many unexpected anecdotes in this 
book is that Marshall first saw his Auk article in print at the out-of-the-way home of 
a British ornithologist, while waiting for a ship home to the U.S. 
But this is just the curtain-raiser for the extraordinary chapters on the birth of the 
wildlife-refuge system, in which Marshall worked from shortly after the war until his 
selection as a senior official working on endangered species in the 1970s. Marshall was 
involved in early decisions about the direction of Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge in 
Nevada (there is considerable detail about this early work) and the Sacramento refuge 
complex (where he was assigned to show Peter Scott his first wild Ross's Goose and 
escorted Jean Delacour). His years at Malheur during the 36-year reign of legendary 
manager John Scharff provide a vivid sense of how that refuge came of age. 
Also of great interest are chapters related to the management of new refuges in 
Hawaii and Alaska and the remarkably informal sequence of events that led to the 
establishment of the three refuges in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. It was an era 
of highly personalized decision making, before the Environmental Protection Agency 
and before all manner of procedures required today, yet the government bureaucracy 
has always provided challenges, and this book explains how the biologists of the time 
dealt with those issues. 
There is a certain whiff of the Wild West in these recollections. Witness John 
Scharff allowing a local rancher to use a refuge truck on his acreage in exchange for 
use of the ranch tractor for refuge work instead of trucking a refuge tractor 50 miles 
over dubious roads. I can’t help but admire the willingness of people of judgment to 
make good but politically risky decisions and deal with the consequences. Certainly 
the wildlife official who was prepared to risk his career by making ecologically sound 
decisions in the face of a negative report from the General Accounting Office and 
a prodding Congress would be harder to come by today, when a field guide to the 
jellyfish seems a necessary desk companion to anyone working with the political 
establishment. 
Marshall’s years in Washington, D.C., and in the West working on endangered- 
species legislation are set forth here as well, with an extraordinary series of personal 
vignettes of interactions with people that can only be placed in the “who would have 
guessed” category, for example, the discovery of Defense Secretary James Schlesinger 
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