Naturalist - Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art - page 12

lizards lay eggs instead of giving live birth, the famous herpetologist huffily dismissed
him.
Fitch's failure to excel in coursework at Oregon was no doubt due to boredom and
lack of favorable mentors, and perhaps also immaturity and extracurricular activities.
He was on the university's cross-country team, ran the mile and two-mile events in
track, and owned a motorcycle. His dad bought the wrecked Indian Scout for five dollars
and persuaded their handyman to restore it to working condition, after which Henry
ranged ever more widely in search of reptiles. He finally took a bad spill in tar and
gravel on the way to collect horned lizards near Klamath Falls, and his grandmother,
visiting from Massachusetts that summer, prevailed upon him to give up the motorcycle.
As those rocky years drew to a close, paleontologist Earl Packard, who taught field
geology at Oregon and knew Henry's father, urged the son to pursue advanced stud-
ies at the University of California. Henry already had been impressed by quotes from a
1916 paper on Colorado Desert fauna by Berkeley undergraduate Charles Camp, which
he'd read in John Van Denburgh's ReptilesofWesternNorthAmerica. 7 Here, finally, was
a course of action for an aspiring field worker: observe animals, catch them for study,
publish the findings, and thereby contribute to science. By 1931 Camp had received a
Ph.D. from Columbia and returned to his alma mater, so Henry, having worked on the
family ranch for a year after graduation, headed south. He soon fell under the spell of
one of the country's most eminent biologists, a man who by dint of his own rugged back-
ground would appreciate an unconventional newcomer from the Rogue River Valley.
In 1908, Annie Alexander, a naturalist, hunter, and heiress of sugar and steamship com-
panies, founded the University of California's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Miss Al-
exander, as all but closest friends knew her, had corresponded with C. Hart Merriam of
the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey about her collection of mammal skins and skulls. 8
Merriam was a distinguished scientist and administrator, having discovered many new
species and formalized a theory of ecological “life zones” from studies in Arizona's San
Francisco Peak region, and he encouraged Alexander to make specimens the core of a
West Coast vertebrate research center. On the basis of correspondence about shared
goals and a favorable first meeting, she selected Joseph Grinnell, a young faculty mem-
ber at Throop Polytechnic Institute (now California Institute of Technology), as M.V.Z.'s
first director.
Grinnell was of New England ancestry, like Fitch, but his outdoor skills traced back
to a childhood among the Sioux and later experience with indigenous Alaskans. His
father was a medical officer for the Pine Ridge Reservation, and Chief Red Cloud, one
of Crazy Horse's contemporaries, called the boy “my little friend Joe.” Having subse-
quently prepared bird skins and published scientific papers as a teenager, Grinnell ac-
complished so much at Throop that he was already well known when he moved to Berke-
ley. For the next thirty years he studied geographic variation and the origin of spe-
cies, refined ecological concepts of niche and competitive exclusion, and stood as an
early, forceful proponent of conservation. His vision emphasized specimen-based sci-
ence within an intellectual framework of education and research. Rather than simply
building collections, M.V.Z. would synthesize knowledge of organisms, behavior, en-