Each year, The Wildlife Society bestows its highest honor, the Aldo Leopold Memorial Award, to an individual with distinguished service to wildlife conservation. The following year, that individual delivers the Aldo Leopold Address. This year’s address is being delivered by Maurice Hornocker, the 2024 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award recipient.
Pre-recorded Presentation
Maurice Hornocker is unable to attend TWS2025, but our staff is traveling to him. Following the TWS Awards presentation on Sunday, October 5 (7:30pm, Hall D), we will show a pre-recorded presentation of Hornocker’s Address, recorded and produced by our Digital Media Manager, Katie Perkins.
Maurice Hornocker
Retired wildlife biologist and author of “Cougars on the Cliff.”
Maurice Hornocker grew up on a farm in Iowa, developing a natural curiosity for wildlife in his early years. He received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Montana, then began his PhD research on mountain lions at the University of British Columbia under another Aldo Leopold Award-winning mentor, the 1970 recipient Ian McTaggart Cowan. For this work, which was the first of its kind, Hornocker studied the ecology of the big cats in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area in Idaho—an area relatively free of human effects on wildlife.
With the help of David Johnson, a retired journalist, Hornocker wrote about these experiences in field research on mountain lions in his memoir, Cougars on the Cliff: One Man’s Pioneering Quest to Understand the Mythical Mountain Lion.