“Totally unusual,” Jim Patton said of the Yosemite study. “Absolutely unique. This was the first decade of the 1900s! Mendelian genetics had only been rediscovered in 1904. There were no principles of ecology. There were no principles of systematic or evolutionary biology to speak of. So here comes Grinnell with mathematical perspectives on change in characteristics through time in populations across geography. I mean, nobody was thinking in those terms. Grinnell was already seeing changes in California’s fauna a hundred years ago, and he set out to document what the record was in his day.”

A remarkable aspect of the Yosemite work was its selflessness. Grinnell lacked ego—or, rather, he was willing to accept a delayed and posthumous gratification of ego. He recognized that the real significance of his work would not be realized until generations after his death.

The idea for a resurvey of Grinnell’s pioneering work was both a millennial and centennial notion. It came to Craig Moritz, the current director of the museum, in 2001, in his eighth month on the job, as the museum entered its 93rd year and its 100th anniversary loomed on the horizon. Moritz was 41. He had a thick mane of graying hair and an owlish way of peering at you over the tops of his glasses. Fresh from the University of Queensland, he had just begun the work of shortening his broad Australian vowels and struggling with the identification of California birds. He had left behind the steamy landscapes of his former fieldwork, the rainforests of northeastern Australia, with their strangler figs, tree ferns, cockatoos, cassowaries, and tree kangaroos. He was busy now learning the digger pines, sugar pines, red-tailed hawks, kangaroo rats, and mule deer of the California outback. “I had come here on sabbatical in the early 1990s,” he said. “I fell in love with the area and with the museum. There are not many academic institutions that you walk into and it has a soul.”

“grinnell was a hard-ass. he expected you to work hard. my impression is they might be less strict about it now, but back then grinnell guided everything, even the way you punctuate. you don’t waste ink by putting in periods unnecessarily.” — LES CHOW

“When Craig arrived, we gave him a copy of Grinnell’s Philosophy of Nature” Jim Patton recalled. “This was a book published by UC Press, a collection of Grinnell’s papers. In one of them, written in 1910, just two years after he founded the museum, he states that the value of the collection that we are building now really won’t be understood for a long time to come.” Grinnell wrote: “I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the West, wherever we now work.”

“Craig read this paper, and he picked up on this quote,” said Patton. “He came running in and said, ‘Hey, have you guys seen this?’ We grabbed him by the shirt collar and took him to a portrait of Grinnell outside the library, which has that quote framed. We said, ‘Yeah, we’ve seen this.’”

The Grinnell resurvey was one of those ideas whose time has come. Planted by Grinnell himself in the quotation emblazoned on the library wall, the seed of the notion, after a gestation of 90 years, began germinating in several minds simultaneously.

“I had been thinking of Grinnell for a number of years,” Les Chow told me. “I had actually planned in the next year or two to submit a grant request to the Yosemite Fund to try to redo Grinnell’s survey.”

Chow, the research wildlife biologist in Yosemite for the U.S. Geological Survey, is a Berkeley graduate, Class of ’84. He lingered at the university to get an M.S. in wildland resource science, and in the course of his stay he became a Grinnellian himself. “When you go to Berkeley and take natural history of vertebrates or mammalogy, you are taught the Grinnell system. It’s fairly rigid, but it has served us pretty well. You can tell Berkeley products, because we all are trained that way. We go on to university to teach, and we pass on this method, and it becomes sort of a long legacy. Grinnell was a hard-ass. He expected you to work hard. My impression is they might be less strict about it now, but back then Grinnell guided everything, even the way you punctuate. You don’t waste ink by putting in periods unnecessarily.”

In Animal Life in the Yosemite and in later prose generated by the museum, I had noticed myself that the punctuation was sparse. It was remarkable: If Les Chow was right, then Grinnell, 70 years after his death, is still detectable in the breathless pace and run-on rhythms of museum sentences. Moritz, upon arriving from Australia, had sensed that this museum had a soul. That soul belonged, evidently, to Joe Grinnell. If any spirit walked the aisles between the ranks of gray-steel museum cases, then surely it was his. He was that Pied Piper who had set the museum’s mice and shrews and voles to marching in their rows.

Congress, Chow said, had allocated funds to the National Park Service for an inventorying and monitoring program, with the goal of identifying at least 90 percent of the vascular plants and vertebrate animals within the parks. No survey of such scope and depth had been attempted in the Sierra Nevada since Grinnell. About $30,000 had been earmarked for the vertebrate surveys in the Sierra. “That’s not nearly enough,” said Chow. “Steve Thompson and I—he’s the wildlife biologist for the Park Service in Yosemite—were scratching our heads over the problem.

“I had gone to Berkeley. I had taken mammalogy with Jim Patton, and I knew that he had recently retired. I decided to give the museum a call to see if they had any interest in coming to the park to do some collecting. It just so happened that they had been talking at the museum about doing a Grinnell survey again. They jumped at the chance.”

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