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

2 The Poetry of Wilderness

chapter two The Poetry of Wilderness Despite a brief flourishing of scientific research in the American national parks in the 1930s, the National Park Service’s interest in science had never been strong. As late as the 1950s, for example, the iconic grizzly bears of Yellowstone or Mount McKinley had not yet been subjected to systematic study. In the late 1950s, however, the Park Service began encouraging wildlife biologists to apply some of the techniques of drugging, trapping, and tagging that they had recently developed to the study of grizzly bears and other wildlife in the parks. In 1957, the biologist Albert W. Erickson had reported at the North American Wildlife Conference his success in live-trapping and handling black bears in Michigan using the drugs pentobarbital sodium and succinylcholine chloride, a tranquilizer and a muscle relaxant. (This was the same Erickson who would later help Donald Siniff tranquilize and tag seals in the Antarctic.) Erickson’s success inspired a number of other biologists to extend his techniques to other large carnivores, including grizzly bears. The Park Service also took notice. Heavily visited parks such as Yellowstone had been troubled by increasing human-bear conflicts as visitorship expanded dramatically in the postwar decades. Techniques for safely studying and handling bears held out the promise of resolving The Poetry of Wilderness 53 these conflicts without reducing either the number of bears or the number of visitors.1 The only region of the United States outside of Alaska with a significant number of grizzly bears was the northern Rockies, where they were protected in Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park. In the late 1950s, Park Service naturalists began discussions with John Craighead, head of the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, about studying the region’s bears. Although Craighead had no particular experience studying large carnivores, he was a rising star in wildlife biology; he and his twin brother and close collaborator , Frank Craighead, had developed a number of innovative techniques for studying raptors, waterfowl, and other wildlife. In November 1957, Gordon Fredine, the Park Service’s chief biologist in Washington, suggested that Craighead conduct a study of the entire grizzly population of the northern Rockies, but Craighead’s preference was for a narrower study focused on the parks. That preference became even stronger after Craighead visited Yellowstone’s Trout Creek garbage dump with one of the Park Service naturalists in the fall of 1958 and witnessed the high concentration of bears feeding there. Craighead immediately realized the research opportunity provided by the dump, even though, as he told Fredine after the visit, any data gathered would have to be interpreted in light of the “artificial conditions.” The Craigheads and their collaborators would later write that they had selected Yellowstone for the study because it had a “wild grizzly population sufficiently free of artificiality that fundamental biological data could be obtained an on a quantitative basis.” But it was the Trout Creek dump and the “artificial conditions” for science that it provided in combination with the park’s natural conditions—not the latter alone—that convinced John Craighead and Frank Craighead to study Yellowstone’s grizzlies.2 Despite strong interest in the study among Park Service leadership in Washington and at Yellowstone, the Park Service was unable to provide the Craigheads with any funds. Indeed, it was the lack of funding for research within the Park Service that had led Fredine and others to reach out to the Craigheads, who could draw on other sources of support. The Craigheads initially turned to the Wildlife Management Institute, which provided a small exploratory grant for the first field season, and to the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration, which had supported much of their earlier work. The Craigheads began experimenting with techniques for handling bears in 1959 with the assistance of Maurice Hornocker, one of John Craighead’s graduate students, and Wesley Woodgerd, a biologist with the Montana Fish and 54 Wired Wilderness Game Department. By July 1959 they had successfully trapped seven bears and immobilized them using the same muscle relaxant that Erickson had used. The Craigheads focused their work on bears gathering at the Trout Creek dump, who could be easily lured into large traps made out of culvert pipes with bait such as honey, bacon, or pineapple juice. They also used dart guns to fire drugloaded syringes at free-ranging bears. In addition to being weighed...