San Jacinto Survey
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CONTACT:
Phil Unitt
619.255.0235
fax: 619.232.0248
birds@sdnhm.org

Methods

Grinnell and Swarth had 20 primary base camps distributed around the San Jacinto region. We will use these as the framework for our effort. The biologists of the 1908 expedition, apportioned between two teams, spent a total of 184 team-days in the field from 1 May to 5 September. They spent from 3 to 25 days at each camp, collecting and observing around it as could be done on foot. They recorded their activities in great detail, in notebooks which the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology has scanned electronically and made available on its website. They took about 40 photographs of the sites and marked their sites and routes on topographic maps, all of which have been scanned as well. These records will enable us to ensure that we revisit the same areas covered 100 years ago as exactly as possible.

Sites of camps of the expedition of 1908

Of course, the 1908 expedition was run under constraints from which biologists working a century later have been freed. Grinnell and his team traveled by railroad, horse-drawn wagon, or on foot. As a result, they visited most sites only once. Today, all but three sites are accessible by motor vehicle, enabling us to spread our effort more evenly through the seasons to get a more comprehensive picture of the region’s biology than was possible in 1908. We propose surveying each site repeatedly, adding a visit to each site in winter, and distributing the remaining visits through the spring and summer as is appropriate for the elevation of the site and the animals’ life cycle (more in the spring for low-desert sites, shifting toward summer for higher mountain sites). Furthermore, we propose spreading the effort in the field over three years. Because of the wide swings in rainfall from one year to the next, spreading the study over three years increases the chances that the study will encompass a representative sample of current climate conditions.

Some of the participants on the 1908 expedition in Strawberry Valley, San Jacinto Mountains.
Joseph Grinnell

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology has developed a protocol for the resurveys of all its historic expeditions, and our proposed expedition to the San Jacinto region will follow this closely. The protocol is designed to replicate the effort of 1908 as closely as possible while increasing standardization that will enable the effort of 2008–10 to be replicated even more closely in the future. The coordination of the survey protocol also ensures that the results of the San Jacinto resurvey can be compared with those of other similar resurveys being carried out elsewhere by the University of California.