Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
FOUR
Field Biologist
MY PARENTS' GENERATION EXPERIENCED
the 1940s as itinerant, uncertain, sometimes dangerous
years. For Henry Fitch the decade following graduate work encompassed a burst of re-
search as well as marriage and finally a move to Kansas, events that proved central to
his happiness. First, however, the newly minted Ph.D. needed a job. Although one West
Coast college expressed interest, Henry favored fieldwork and thus joined a group foun-
ded by Annie Alexander's friend C. Hart Merriam. By then the Bureau of Biological Sur-
vey was focused on pest control, so the new Ph.D.'s first task was determining the impact
of rabbits and rodents on ranching in the Sierra Nevada foothills. On March 31, 1938,
he wrote Joseph Grinnell from the San Joaquin Experimental Range that “associates and
surroundings here are agreeable, but I have difficulty confining my attention to ground
squirrels amid the abundance of reptile life.”
Any naturalist knows that snakes, raptors, and carnivores eat herbivores, so Henry
soon set his sights on studying them all, but the Range superintendent disapproved
and assigned someone to monitor his new employee. With characteristic tenacity, Henry
“bootlegged” the predator work and over the next five years, his boss's obstructionism
notwithstanding, gained phenomenally well-documented insights. Kangaroo rat diets
were assessed by sorting 5,371 seeds from cheek pouches, sifting 37,904 seed hulls from
burrow mounds, and recovering 5,024 items from burrow caches; 9,135 prey items were
War II, however, delayed publication of the results for almost as long as had been re-
quired to compile them.
Henry was drafted on four days' notice in the spring of 1941, at age thirty-two. The
“influential saurologist” portrait that later caught my eye was taken during his first few
months in the army. Henry trained as a medic and pharmacist at William Beaumont Gen-
eral Hospital in El Paso, and in deference to family pride—his paternal great-grandfather
also was a pharmacist—he sent home a photograph of himself wearing the only headgear
available in the military studio. In September a new directive indefinitely extended ser-
vice only for draftees twenty-six or younger , and he was unexpectedly discharged. Henry
gladly resumed research at the Range. Within a few months, however, soon after the
Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was abruptly recalled, and this time he was in for a
long haul. When Chester and Alice Fitch were asked to provide a photograph for
Hand-
topic of Lizards
while their son was overseas, they sent the one of him in a cavalry hat.
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