page_title: Joseph Grinnell
section_title: Predator control
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Grinnell / Conservation / National parks / Predator control
caption_attribution_description: Wolverine
context_page_description: Joseph Grinnell was an American field biologist and zoologist. He made extensive studies of the fauna of California, and is credited with introducing a method of recording precise field observations known as the Grinnell System. He served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley from the museum's inception in 1908 until his death.
  He edited The Condor, a publication of the Cooper Ornithological Club, from 1906 to 1939, and authored many articles for scientific journals and ornithological magazines. He wrote several books, among them The Distribution of the Birds of California and Animal Life in the Yosemite. He also developed and popularized the concept of the niche.
context_section_description: Grinnell argued in "Animal Life as an Asset to National Parks" against several park service management policies; one of which was the predator control program. Congress had passed legislation  a year earlier that instructed the Bureau of Biological Survey (now the US Fish and Wildlife Service) to destroy predators that "are injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry on the national forests and the public domain ...". 
  The new National Park Service agency used predator control agents from the bureau to trap wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions within park boundaries. The agency's first director, Stephen Mather saw his primary responsibility to the new national-park idea as one of building a constituency to support the parks, and feared that if predator populations were not controlled inside park boundaries, they would wander to adjoining private lands to kill livestock. Mather did not want angry ranchers complaining to their congressional representatives that the national parks were bad for the ranching business.
  Grinnell, George Melendez Wright, a student of Grinnell's, and others objected to the predator control policy. Grinnell argued that, "As a rule, predaceous animals should be left unmolested and allowed to retain their primitive relation to the rest of the fauna ...  as their number is already kept within proper limits by the available food supply, nothing is to be gained by reducing it still further."  But trapping of rare animals for scientific study was an exception, he added "A justifiable exception may be made when specimens are required for scientific purposes by authorized representatives of public institutions, and it should be remarked in this connection that without a scientific investigation of the animal life in the parks, and an extensive collection of specimens, no thorough understanding of the conditions or of the practical problems they involve is possible."
  In July 1915, during the Yosemite survey, Charles Lewis Camp trapped two wolverines, a male and female. The survey results were published in  Animal Life of the Yosemite with an entry on wolverine (Gulo gulo): "the wolverine is a rare animal anywhere in the Sierra Nevada. Its inclusion here is based upon the capture of two individuals at the head of Lyell Canyon."
  The last confirmed California wolverine was killed seven years later by local trapper and miner Albert J. Gardisky in Mono County near Saddlebag Lake on February 22, 1922.  This complete specimen is located in the mammal collection at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Since hunting and trapping had not yet been outlawed in national parks,  Grinnell, the museum's director, initially took advantage of the situation, purchasing skins, skeletons and carcasses for the museum.
  Trapping was banned in Yosemite National Park by 1925, and in all national parks by 1931.
  Grinnell was aware of the possible extirpation of the wolverine in California by 1937, if not earlier, for he wrote a summary of all documentation, sightings, captures and stories on wolverines in Fur-bearing Mammals of California, with the last known sighting listed at 1924. Grinnell estimated  " at the present time (1933) there are at most no more than 15 pairs of wolverine left in the State."  He warned that there was a  " necessity of a closed season for the wolverine if it was to escape the fate of the grizzly bear."
caption: A wolverine.
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