After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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like zoos, they also promoted themselves as sites for leisure and entertainment. To attract patrons, they often emphasized the exotic: African mammals arranged in dramatic dioramas, reconstructed skeletons of immense blue whales, life-size models of snarling tyrannosaurs, and the obligatory aquatic scenes of quizzical duck-billed platypuses.10
The MVZ would develop a different approach. It would forego international expeditions and the collection of exotic specimens, and it would delegate the task of staging public exhibitions to other institutions, such as the California Academy of Sciences. Grinnell wanted to establish the West Coast’s first major center for biological research, and like the generation of California naturalists who came before him, he focused his work on the region where he lived. Under Grinnell, the MVZ accrued a small staff of skilled researchers and collectors dedicated to the study of native fauna in and around California. The state became not only a study site but also an organizing framework and common bond for the museum’s researchers, students, patrons, and network of local informants.11
Grinnell welcomed specimens from other areas of the North American West, especially those adjacent to California, but as early as 1907 he wrote to Alexander to protest her planned acquisition of specimens from more-distant regions. Alexander had proposed to purchase a large collection from the Galápagos Islands, which to many observers would have seemed like a coup for a small, upstart museum. Yet Grinnell argued that the Galápagos had been “worked over again and again, better than any area of similar extent in California.” Unlike these islands, which had been popular with naturalists since Charles Darwin’s time, California was “in the newest part of the new world” and still offered a fresh field for research. The state, Grinnell concluded a few years later, “is practically inexhaustible, is naturally of easiest access and should be of greatest interest to this institution.”12
Grinnell viewed the physical collections of the MVZ not only as an important contribution to future generations of natural historians but also as the foundation of a comprehensive methodology that would foster his ambitious research program. Throughout his life, he focused on three interrelated areas of theoretical inquiry: the classification of biophysical environments, the spatial distribution of vertebrate species, and the ways that organism-environment interactions shaped animal evolution. These interests inspired one of the most innovative and energetic careers in the history of biology. Between 1893 and 1939, Grinnell published 554 books and articles. He extended C. Hart Merriam’s life zone concept, developed the idea of the niche, and provided a basis for the competitive exclusion principle. He also popularized the use of trinomial taxonomic classification, the division of distinct species into less-distinct subspecies defined by their morphological differences and geographic ranges. Grinnell viewed these fine distinctions, identifiable only through close observation and laborious mapping, as essential for understanding the evolutionary processes that led to the emergence of new species.13
Some of Grinnell’s most significant contributions involved his biogeographical research, which refined, revised, and extended Darwin’s theories about speciation, including the role of physical geography in the processes of adaptation and radiation. As early as 1904, Grinnell’s work on the chestnut-backed chickadee signaled his intent to develop the role of geography in evolutionary theory. A decade later he published two landmark works about the Colorado River, the first of which explored it as a pathway of species dispersal and the second of which considered it as a barrier. His nuanced thinking about the complexity of physical space and its importance in evolution provided a basis for countless future studies. Grinnell’s many protégés built on his work and amplified its influence even further. In 1941, for example, his former student Alden Miller published a classic study on speciation in the avian genus Junco, which Ernst Mayr later cited as a crucial contribution to the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology.14
Several influences shaped Grinnell’s work on spatial processes. At Stanford he studied among a group of naturalists who were developing theories of speciation based on geographical distribution. He arrived in Berkeley at a time when researchers in North America and Britain were beginning to think more rigorously about wildlife-habitat relationships, and the influences of a number of those individuals appear throughout his work.15 By the 1930s and 1940s, members of this loosely knit community included such key figures in the history of ecology as Charles Elton, Paul Errington, Herbert Stoddard, Aldo Leopold, and David Lack.
Grinnell’s most important influences, however, were the places where he conducted his research. In California’s mountains and rivers, he found evidence for the importance of migratory corridors and impediments to animal movement. In its valleys, he saw isolated centers of evolution that contained large numbers of endemic species. And in its fires and floods, he witnessed the unpredictable forces of landscape change that altered the availability of resources and rearranged animal populations. California was Grinnell’s mentor as well as his laboratory. Decades of fieldwork there taught him that one could not understand ecology and evolution without history and geography.
Building the kind of collection necessary to conduct this research required Grinnell to become an effective administrator. He maintained Alexander’s crucial support, secured funds for expeditions, established survey priorities, sought the advice of distant colleagues, and served as a mentor, counselor, disciplinarian, cheerleader, and occasional therapist to his assistants in the field. He could be pedantic and demanding, but he earned the universal admiration of his students and colleagues. He also became a scrupulous curator who spent much of his time on technical details. Which caliber gun should fieldworkers use to collect songbirds? Should museum staff skin bats or preserve them in formaldehyde? How much cornstarch would protect a badger skull from damage during shipment? Which brand of India ink was best for labeling specimens? What color paint should coat the walls of the MVZ? These questions may seem trivial, but Grinnell regarded every detail of museum administration as essential to his vision of a comprehensive research methodology.16
His primary goal was to develop a collection of biological specimens that would represent California’s diverse native fauna and enable researchers to answer basic biological questions about the evolutionary relationships between organisms and their environments. Yet by the time he began his work, hunting and habitat loss had already decimated many of the species he aimed to study. “Many species of vertebrate animals are disappearing; some are gone already,” he wrote. “All that the investigator of the future will have . . . will be the remains of these species preserved more or less faithfully, along with the data accompanying them, in the museums of the country.”17 Museum work was not only part of a research methodology but also a form of conservation. The two were inextricably linked.
Collecting specimens in California required Grinnell and his assistants to stay one step ahead of the forces of land use and environmental change. They scrambled to survey aquatic environments before the dredgers, dikers, dynamiters, and dam builders arrived. They raced to collect in undeveloped valleys just days before farmers cleared the vegetation and leveled the soil. They spent weeks searching remote mountains for once-common game birds and fur-bearing mammals that had been driven to the far corners of their ranges. And they mapped the spread of exotic species, such as the European starling and the English sparrow, that had colonized the landscape and were expanding their ranges.18
Grinnell and Alexander discussed these problems as early as 1907, and they based the MVZ’s early surveying priorities on the assumption that many native species would soon disappear. Before the museum even opened, Grinnell suggested to Alexander that its first official expedition should visit the Imperial Valley, in the flat, hot, low-elevation desert of southeastern California. The Imperial Valley had several endemic species, and Grinnell worried that some were about to go extinct. Water diversion from the Colorado River had enabled farmers to develop the valley for intensive agriculture. In 1905 one of the new irrigation canals ruptured, and for the next two years the Colorado River poured into the desiccated bed of an ancient lake. This deluge created California’s largest body of water, the Salton Sea, and produced a new landscape populated by new plants and new animals. Grinnell later wrote that he found “nothing attractive about collecting in a settled-up, level country,” such as the Imperial Valley. But he knew that “it ought to be done, and the longer we wait, the fewer ‘waste lots’ there will be” in which to find remaining populations