Homer and Edna enjoying a sunny day with friends at Ashley Pond. Photo by Sharon Snyder

Homer Pickens and Smokey Bear in the plane that will take them to Washington DC. Courtesy/U.S. Forest Service

By SHARON SNYDER
Los Alamos Historical Society

Two snowy white geese on Ashley Pond have captivated the community in the past months. The male goose, Homer, has lived on the pond for several years, but in January, an elegant companion was seen swimming next to him. She was soon referred to as Homer’s  “girlfriend,” his “feathered beauty,” and sometimes “Homer’s Honey.”

Although those tributes were nice, it was clear that his lovely lady needed a name. At that point, the community gladly became involved, submitting ideas for the name. The Daily Post accepted suggestions, and two names—Edna and Marge—were the most popular. Votes were sent to the newspaper, and in the end, Edna won out.

A number of residents were disappointed, but historically, Edna was a good choice. Our geese aren’t the first couple with those names in the history of New Mexico. 

In 1927, a young man named Homer Pickens traveled from the Texas Panhandle to join his older brother, Albert, at a mountain camp near Cuba, NM. Albert Pickens was a hunter and trapper and ultimately worked for the U.S. Biological Survey. In the time Homer spent with his brother, he observed and learned and eventually was also hired by the Survey.

With a secure job, Homer’s thoughts turned to a girl back home, and he asked Edna Burton to marry him. She agreed, and they rented an apartment in Roswell, where Homer was based with the Biological Survey. His first assignment after they were married took him away for two weeks. When he returned, Edna put her foot down and decreed that she would go with him when he returned to the camp. “I was going to live in the tent with him,” she recalled.

From then on, wherever he was assigned, Edna drove their car and Homer drove a government truck that hauled tents and equipment and pulled a trailer for his horse. When the camp was relocated to the Vermejo Park country, Edna decided she might as well be working with the rest of the crew. Homer told her that if she had nerve enough to ask the supervisor for a job, it was okay with him. The next thing he knew, she was on the payroll! Edna called those weeks “one of the most enjoyable times of my life.”

In 1931, Homer received an appointment to the New Mexico Game and Fish Department. The following year, he camped in Water Canyon, south of the Los Alamos Ranch School in an area now known as S-Site. For a year he led an effort to control mountain lions in the area and became well known in the canyons and mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, but those exploits would be overshadowed in 1951, when Homer Pickens became a national figure. 

In the spring of 1951, a fire raged through the Capitan Mountains near Roswell, burning 18,000 acres of the Lincoln National Forest. A little black bear cub captured the heart of a nation when he was found clinging to a tree and was rescued.

The U.S. Forest Service had created a fictional mascot called Smokey Bear in 1944 as a symbol for promoting forest fire prevention, but the forest fire survivor became the real Smokey Bear. He was airlifted to a veterinary clinic in Santa Fe and treated for singed fur and burns on his feet. After being stabilized, the little bear was placed with the Pickens family to recuperate. Most everyone has seen Smokey Bear in ad campaigns, but Pickens’s sons remembered the real bear.

At the time of Capitan fire, Homer Pickens was the assistant director of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, and he was selected as one of two men to escort Smokey Bear to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, where the bear would live as a national icon until his death in 1976. 

Homer Pickens was appointed director of the New Mexico Fish and Game Commission in 1953. He retired in 1958 but had a hard time staying away from the work he loved. In 1961 he applied for the job of conservation specialist at Los Alamos and went back to work for eight more years. His life work can be summed up in his own words: “I have come to understand the need to preserve the diverse renewable natural resources of New Mexico.” Homer Pickens died in 1995 at the age of 91. Edna Pickens preceded him in 1985 at the age of 80.