CONTRIBUTED PHOTO The Herring family.

Greetings TR readers, outdoors enthusiasts, and fellow conservationists. We are Emily and Joe Herring, the new (but hopefully familiar) contributing writers to this space occupied by Outdoors Today for the past 34 years. To be asked by outgoing writer Garry Brandenburg and the TR staff to fill this role is truly an honor and a privilege that we don’t take lightly.

If you don’t know us personally, you might recall seeing our occasional submissions to Outdoors Today over the past ten years whenever Garry was away on some far-off hunting or sightseeing trip. Apparently, we did just good enough to be asked back, this time for more than just a single entry. We promise to work hard and keep it interesting as we provide content and share our personal stories, observations, and news about all things relevant to the natural world. To provide some context, we thought a short biography is in order:

Emily is the current Director of the Marshall County Conservation Board (MCCB), operating out of the Grimes Farm nature center. In this role, she coordinates a team of dedicated employees who maintain and manage both the natural habitats and man-made facilities of Marshall County’s 38 different parks, trails, wildlife areas, and refuges. Prior to becoming director in 2023, she served as the staff Naturalist for MCCB, providing educational programming antd guided outdoor recreation for the public. A graduate of Iowa State University in Animal Ecology, she has worked in the conservation field for over twenty years in central Iowa. Emily’s interest in the natural world began as a young girl, catching frogs in the pond and exploring the wooded draw on her family’s farm outside Pleasantville, IA.

Joe is a professional Forester who has worked in nearly twenty different counties for over twenty years helping landowners and Iowans develop tree planting, reforestation, and forest management plans. He grew up in Earlham, Iowa with a father who is a retired Wildlife Biologist. Hunting and fishing with his two brothers were common, along with exploring the creeks and woods of Madison County. Joe received his B.S. in Forest Ecosystem Management and M.S. in Water Resources from Iowa State University.

We don’t know the exact size of Garry’s hiking boots, but we know we have big shoes to fill. Our intentions with this space are to continue to inspire readers, to invoke a sense of awe, wonder, and contemplation for our natural world; to inform and bring awareness on the relevant and pressing current issues; to share experiences, particularly highlighting the outdoor adventures we (or you) take as a family or with young children – helping other families, parents, and grandparents wanting to get kids off their screens and outside more often. And finally, as Garry so aptly put it – we wish “to continue the never-ending need for conservation education,” which we firmly believe is the most impactful way towards a citizenry who respects, nurtures, and protects our natural world. So with that, our plan is to jointly share the writing duties, as equally and peacefully as any married couple can, in an every-other-week column under the new name, “Round River.”

A note about the title: it’s not often in life that you have the privilege of conceiving a unique name for a newspaper column, and we admit to struggling a bit. Before reading Garry’s final farewell, we considered the name of a lesser-known Aldo Leopold book (Round River), because we’ve always loved the metaphor that the title instills. Living in the most environmentally-altered state in the union, with a shared love for river kayaking and fishing, and where water quality is a long-standing and ongoing hot-button issue – we are steadfast in our belief that as users of the land, nothing ever truly gets “sent downstream.” When it comes to our actions as human beings, how we manage our land and treat our watersheds (and by extension, our neighbors and our planet), essentially what goes around, comes around. And so when we did finally get the chance to read Garry’s farewell missive, only to see that he coincidentally quoted the book Round River, the decision became easy.

We look forward to having you on this journey with us to begin the year 2026. Thank you to the readers, to Garry Brandenburg, and Rob Maharry for giving us this opportunity. In turn, we’d love to hear from you and learn who you are too. If you have stories or photos to share, nature-related questions, topic ideas, or just feedback to offer, please reach out to us. Emily: eherring@marshallcounty.gov or Joe: heyjoeherring@gmail.com.

We’d like to end with a quote that we feel captures our mutual philosophy on conservation and the theme of this column:

“In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”

— Baba Dioum