Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife

1 Cold War Game

chapter one Cold War Game In search of new methods of locating, tracking, and identifying individual wild animals in their natural habitats, wildlife biologists in the 1950s looked to the electronic technologies of the Cold War and the space age. The recent invention of the transistor had made it possible to build, for the first time, radio transmitters small enough to be attached to living creatures without causing significant changes in behavior. One of the first biologists to seize upon the opportunity presented by this technological development was Dwain W. Warner , an ornithologist at the University of Minnesota. Born in 1917, Warner had grown up on a dairy farm near Northfield, Minnesota, the home of Carleton College, where he completed an undergraduate degree in botany and zoology in 1939. He began his graduate work in ornithology in 1939 at Cornell University under Arthur Allen, a pioneer in field recording of birdsongs. Warner was initially interested in studying Mexican birds, but when he was posted to the South Pacific as part of a biological team during the Second World War, he shifted his focus to that region’s birds for his dissertation. After finishing his degree in 1947, Warner was hired as an assistant professor and curator of birds at the University of Minnesota’s Museum of Natural History. There his research interests 6 Wired Wilderness returned to Mexico, many of whose migratory birds passed through Minnesota on their way to and from northern breeding sites.1 At Cornell Warner had learned techniques for collecting, banding, and observing birds that served as the foundation of his first decade of research in Minnesota. By the mid-1950s, he had also begun exploring the possibility of applying recent advances in instrumentation in the physical sciences to ornithology . This relatively vague set of interests was transformed into a concrete research program by the Sputnik launches of the fall of 1957, the second of which carried a live dog. Warner recalled sharing his frustration with Athelstan Spilhaus, dean of the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota and inventor of the bathythermograph, an important tool for oceanography and submarine warfare: “The Russians put the dog Sputniks up there, and they’re having telemetered back to the Earth both physiological and ecological data on the capsule, and physiological . . . data on the dogs. . . . We haven’t even done that out the window here.”2 With Spilhaus’s support, Warner began seeking funding for a bioelectronics laboratory at the Museum of Natural History. At the same time, he sought a research site where he could deploy animal tracking devices as well as a variety of environmental sensors. In March 1958, Warner described how as-yet untapped resources in the “technological world” would make possible “concise, accurate, and continuous measurements” of ecological systems to Arthur N. Wilcox, director of the University of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Natural History Area. Newly developed telemetric technology would soon make it “possible to have radioed into the laboratory on the campus and recorded on tape and film through every minute of the 365 days of the year numerous kinds of data on micro- and macroclimate, phenology, movements of animals both large and small, even predation and other mortality factors.” “It seems logical,” Warner added, “that, if man is eventually (even soon!) to obtain direct data on environments on moon and planets, the equipment should first be tested on earth. And, if man, other animals and plants are to be transported to other planets, a more thorough understanding of the inter-relationships is imperative.” Warner pointed out that the funds necessary to adapt the instrumentation of the physical sciences to field biology were “staggering to the imagination of the biologist, but, fortunately, are not so to the technologists.”3 Unlike a park or a wildlife refuge, Cedar Creek was devoted solely to natural history and ecological research. In the 1930s the Minnesota Academy of Science had acquired the initial parcels of land and convinced the University of Cold War Game 7 Minnesota to take responsibility for managing the site as a research reserve. In 1940, Wilcox, then chairman of the Academy’s Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions, noted that the Academy was “primarily interested in seeing this forest preserved as nearly as possible in the undisturbed condition so that its original natural history values will be maintained.” That meant that the use of the site for research or education...