An Extraordinary Life
John
Craighead studied many forms of wildlife, including
human beings.
by Vince Devlin
“It
all started in the
1930s with two teenage boys and a hawk named Comet.
The father of the
boys—twin brothers—took them on
long hikes every weekend along the Potomac River, pointing out
various species of plants and birds.
The twins had already talked
their father into letting them
take a barred owl home, which fueled an interest in falconry.
“The sport of kings,” says John Craighead, one of
the
twins. “We learned the American Cooper’s hawk had
never been tamed or trained.” So they found one and did
so.
“It takes quite a
bit of time manning (taming) them and
introducing them to the prey that you want to fly them at,”
Craighead says. “It’s natural for birds of prey to
kill—in fact, they have to kill every day to
survive—and falconry is simply channeling the
bird’s
killing instinct.”
Comet was an extremely
aggressive female, able to take down
prey as large as a cottontail rabbit. “A cottontail is
quite large for a female Cooper’s hawk,” Craighead
says. “Normally a female Cooper’s hawk
wouldn’t
kill prey that large, and to fly a trained one at a cottontail
rabbit was quite a struggle.”
As John and brother Frank
tamed, trained and bonded with
Comet, they kept a diary of their project and took photographs.
Then one day, the teenagers marched into the offices of National
Geographic magazine and asked to see the chairman. We have
written a story about our adventures with hawks, they told a
secretary. And we have pictures. The chairman, himself a twin,
was curious about the two boys down in the magazine’s
lobby. He invited them up to his office.
After hearing them out he
bought their stories and pictures,
and the careers of two of America’s foremost wildlife
biologists and internationally known grizzly bear researchers
were born.
An
Endowed Chair
Today UM—John J.
Craighead’s academic home for a
quarter century—is $470,000 away from being able to
establish the John J. Craighead Chair in Wildlife Biology.
“With this, we can
go after a big name to jump-start the
research he conducted,” says Daniel Pletscher, professor
and director of the wildlife biology program. Pletscher points to
another chair at UM endowed by the Boone & Crockett Club for a
professor of wildlife conservation, currently held by Jack Ward
Thomas, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
“That’s the kind of person we can
attract,” he
says. “John Craighead was an incredible pioneer in his
field. It’s a name everybody recognizes and
respects.”
Craighead headed the Montana
Cooperative Wildlife Research
Unit during his twenty-five-year association with the University.
The endowed chair requires a total of $2.5 million and UM has
collected just over $1 million of that, according to John Scibek,
director of planned giving at the UM Foundation. Major
contributors include the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the
M.J. Murdock Trust, WSB Partnership, the R.K. Mellon Foundation,
Bonnie Snavely, and an anonymous donor.
The school needs additional
donations to make the chair a
reality because two $500,000 challenge grants wait in the wings.
The first kicks in when $1.5 million has been raised, which will
automatically trigger the second, which takes effect when the $2
million mark is hit. The UM Foundation and the University have
until June 30th to get it done.
Grizzlies
and Yellowstone
Most Americans know the
Craigheads for their pioneering
research on grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park from 1959 to
1971. A series of National Geographic television specials took
their science into the living rooms of millions of ordinary
people.
“The grizzly was
not protected and we were able to get
it classified as a threatened species,” John Craighead
says. “Practically nothing was known about it, its life
history, and even less about grizzly populations. It was obvious
if we were going to save the grizzly we had to know a lot more
about its biology. At what age are females able to reproduce? How
many young did they have in a litter? How long were the cubs kept
before they weaned them? What was the mortality rate of the
young, and what caused the mortality?
“It was obvious the
grizzly needed a lot of wilderness
habitat. So to protect the grizzly, we had to protect wilderness
and increase designated areas classified as
wilderness.”
Learning what the bears ate
was important and could only be
accomplished by observation and analyzing feces. “My
brother and I hit on the idea of placing a radio collar on them
so we could locate and observe them whenever we wanted to,
instead of relying on chance,” Craighead says.
“This
radio tracking was so successful that within a few years on all
kinds of animals all over the world, scientists were placing
radios on them. It made a tremendous difference. It probably
increased the observation, I’d have to guess, by at least
fifty-fold. There was just no comparison to how much you could
learn when you had the radio.”
It was all ground-breaking
science. The brothers had to
develop methods to immobilize the bears in order to attach the
tracking devices and ways to gauge their ages to aid their
research.
“We tested a lot of
things and finally got several that
worked well and were safe,” Craighead remembers.
“It
would have been easy to kill a bear by giving it too heavy a
dose. We had to approach it slowly and carefully and relate the
dosage to the weight of the animal. At first that meant capturing
them, but in time we could judge the weight pretty accurately.
That meant we could just shoot them with the propulsive dart,
which negated the need to trap them.”
The Craigheads worked out a
system of determining bears’
ages by sectioning a pre-molar, an important part of their
studies. “This enabled us to determine the age when females
first bred and over time also told us how long females continued
to reproduce,” he says. “One of the most
interesting
things was the grizzly had always been considered a loner, but we
found they were social animals. When they aggregated to feed they
established a social hierarchy with an alpha male at the top, and
then subordinate males and females. It was interesting that the
alpha male didn’t monopolize the breeding. He spent more
time defending his status in the hierarchy. The other large males
did most of the breeding.”
As the Craigheads learned
more about the grizzly, so did the
nation. The popular National Geographic television specials
deftly combined science with a sense of adventure. The research
was a family affair, and both twins brought their wives and
children to Yellowstone, where TV cameras followed them at work
and the children at play. Reminded of a scene where the Craighead
children were shown swinging out over a cliff on a rope and
plunging into a pool of water far below at Upper Falls, Craighead
can’t help but laugh. “We caught hell for doing
that
from the (park) superintendent,” he recalls. “He
thought that was a pretty bad place to put a rope.”
It wasn’t the only
time the twins knocked heads with
park honchos. When Yellowstone officials decided to close the
dumps where grizzlies gathered each spring to feed, the
Craigheads warned that the dumps had become part of the
bears’ ecosystem. They said the dumps should be phased out.
They cautioned that the bears, coming out of hibernation, would
likely look for food elsewhere. That would probably take them
closer to places occupied by humans and could result in danger to
tourists and the possible need to euthanize the bears. The
controversy that followed ended the Craigheads’ Yellowstone
research.
“And,”
notes Pletscher, “they were
eventually proven right.”
An
Indian Prince
The letter arrived from
India, from Prince Dharmakumarsinhji.
The prince, a falconer himself, had read John and Frank
Craighead’s article about hawks in National Geographic. The
twins wrote him back, starting a correspondence that eventually
led to a trip to America by the prince—and an invitation to
India for the young Craigheads.
“He was extremely
intelligent and well-educated,”
John Craighead says. “He was especially interested in
co-education. In those times, Indian women, they didn’t
even bother educating them.”
The Craigheads took the
prince—they called him
“Bapa”—to several universities back East,
and
also on a weekend trip on the Potomac. “My sister and her
friends came along, and Bapa was amazed at what American young
women could do,” Craighead says. “They could swim
the
rapids, paddle canoes, do most things the men did.”
In 1940 the Craigheads
traveled to India. “He put us up
like royalty,” Craighead says. “Every single day at
dawn we would get up and go fly the hawks and falcons, or trap
some. We’d hunt with the birds all morning, return for an
afternoon siesta, then go out again until dusk. When we
weren’t flying the falcons we’d hunt. Quail,
partridges, antelope, wild boar.”
The Craigheads adopted the
dress of their hosts, turbans and
all. Their India adventure included a trip across the country to
attend the three-day-long wedding of the prince’s brother
and hunting trips where cheetahs—trained the same way
falcons were—took down black buck antelope. “The
cheetahs learned they’d be fed, so they’d make a
kill
and allow the handlers to move in,” Craighead says.
“You put a hood on it right away, cut off a leg to give to
the cheetah, and take the rest back to the palace to
eat.”
The prince and his brother
had a dozen falcons apiece and a
dozen men each to handle them all. They engaged in competitions
to see who could train and fly the most successful birds. It was
impossible to keep the birds over India’s hot summers, and
so the birds were turned loose, and new batches trapped in the
fall. “We’d get a bird and keep it for years, but
they had to get new birds and train them every year,”
Craighead says.
The extended trip to India
led to one of the several books
John and Frank would author or co-author over the years: Life
with an Indian Prince.
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To
learn how you can help the John J. Craighead Chair in Wildlife Biology
become a reality, contact:
Dan Pletscher, director of the Wildlife Biology Program,
University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812; (406) 243-6364;
dan.pletscher@umontana.edu
or John Scibek,
director of planned giving,
University of Montana Foundation,
P.O. Box 7159, Missoula, Montana, 59807-7159;
1- (800) 443-2593 or (406) 243-6274;
ScibekJC@mso.umt.edu.
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Bringing
Science to the People
Over the years the titles
would become more
scholarly—John, for instance, published “A
Definitive
System for Analysis of Grizzly Bear Habitat and Other Wilderness
Resources Utilizing LANDSAT Multispectral Imagery and Computer
Technology” in 1982—but the Craigheads never left
the
layman behind. “The positive influence of the Craigheads on
public understanding and appreciation of wildlife and wildlife
research has been incalculable,” John Weaver of the
Wildlife Conservation Society wrote in a profile of the brothers
in 1996.
“Much more than
most people, the Craigheads were able to
bring their science to the people,” said Jack Hogg,
director of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute, in 100
Montanans, a book about the state’s most influential people
of the twentieth century, published by the Missoulian in 2000.
“They made sure that people knew what they were doing and
how it was relevant to the management of our public
lands.”
One of the
Craigheads’ proudest accomplishments was the
passage of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The brothers
loaded their families in kayaks and canoes and tackled the
mightiest rivers of the West. Their writings became much of the
text of the act, and the documentary crews that followed them
helped convince Americans of the need for the legislation.
“We had this
director, he was slow at doing
anything,” Craighead says. “He said he’d
never
really been outdoors before. He kept telling us,
‘You’ve got to give me time to get a feel for the
river.’ So we put him in an Avon raft, looped line around
the cleats on the raft, and told him to hold on tight. Then we
took him over Salmon Falls [on the Salmon River in Idaho]. When
the raft buckled, as it does, he went in. He got his feel for the
river.”
It was a time, Craighead
says, when the Army Corps of
Engineers surveyed every river for dam sites. “They wanted
to put dams everywhere,” he says. The National Wild and
Scenic Rivers Act stopped that. Despite decades of research into
dozens of subjects and their groundbreaking grizzly bear studies,
Craighead makes no bones about it. “The best thing Frank
and I did for conservation,” he says, “was the Wild
and Scenic Rivers Act.”
Frank died in Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, in 2001 at the age of
eighty-five.
Life
with Antonio
He stood somewhere between
three and four feet tall. John
Craighead, a small man himself, towered over the man. “He
was all sinuses and scars, and about as alone as a man could
be,” Craighead says.
He met Antonio on Palawan,
one of the 7,000 islands that make
up the Philippine archipelago. In the Navy and assigned to write
a survival guide for naval aviators, Craighead traveled through
South America and then into the Pacific doing research for the
book.
“Admiral Tom
Hamilton had promised me he’d get me
out in the Pacific after we’d written this book,”
Craighead says. “I was all ready to take off when the war
ended. He told me he’d like me to go anyway and wrote out
the orders. He wanted information on those who survived in that
type of wilderness.”
And so Craighead headed for
Palawan, which he says was
something of an “open prison.” Antonio, he says,
had
been dumped on the island for killing a man who had stolen his
wife. “All he had was a bow and three arrows,”
Craighead says. “He’d kill monkeys and wild pigs to
eat.”
Using a Filipino translator,
Craighead quizzed Antonio to
uncover information on survival in the South Seas, struggling
with parts of it. “Monkey for lunch?” he says.
“It was like eating one of your own kids.” Antonio
chased wild pigs and monkeys through the jungle and Craighead
chased Antonio. “I had a jungle hammock I put up over an
old stream bed,” Craighead says. “Antonio slept by
the fire. If you’ve ever watched a dog sleep, where his
feet move back and forth, well, that’s what Antonio did. He
was always running, even in his sleep.”
When an American base on
Palawan shut down with the end of the
war, Craighead loaded a Jeep with K rations and took them to
Antonio. “They were getting rid of
everything,” he
recalls. “They had all these down sleeping bags, which were
useless in the South Pacific anyway, a pile as big as a house
they poured gasoline on and burned to get rid of. They were
getting rid of the K rations too, so I took a load to Antonio. He
opened them up, and he didn’t eat the food, but he ate the
cigarettes. I left him with enough K rations to feed a lot of
people. But I don’t know what he did with them.”
Craighead made sketches of
Antonio in the jungle and wrote
poems about him.
John Craighead has studied
humans, too.
A
Family Affair
John and Frank are far from
the only Craigheads who have
contributed to conservation. Their sister, Jean Craighead George,
has written more than 100 children’s books about nature,
including My Side of the Mountain, which was made into a
movie.
She and her twin brothers
each had three children apiece and
virtually all of them carry on the family’s association
with nature in one form or another. Craighead children are
involved in the research of everything from polar bears to
freshwater mussels. John W., who studies the latter, is also
helping his father with his archives.
But the Craigheads’
biggest accomplishment may have been
the hundreds of students they inspired over the years. Chris
Servheen, who oversees grizzly recovery for the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, remembers watching the National Geographic
television specials as a youth. “From that point on, I
wanted to do what I do today,” he says. “I know so
many people who have the same story I have. They got into
conservation because of what the Craigheads did.”
Wrote one former student:
“Sometimes as a student you
get lucky with teachers. John and Frank have always been very
busy men, but they also took time to talk, to teach, to share
their vast knowledge with the whole group of students around them
at that time. We camped, fished, photographed, and spent long,
hard hours working together. They shared their vision—their
dream of how wild rivers and wild lands could fit into the modern
American landscape mosaic—while teaching us about the stars
and flowers, to live lightly on the land, and how vulnerable
megacarnivores, wilderness, and wild rivers are to man’s
expanding sphere of influence.”
For
the Birds
It’s just a minute
or two from the bustle of Reserve
Street and Highway 93, but it could be a hundred miles. At the
end of a dead-end street in lower Miller Creek, John Craighead
enjoys a view with no other houses in sight from the rear of the
home he shares with wife Margaret.
He is eighty-eight now, and
the years have robbed him of his
hearing but little else. More than seventy years after he and
Frank trained a hawk named Comet, John Craighead’s life is
still, in large part, for the birds. A raven he nursed back to
health, Rudy, hangs around the backyard and a golden eagle raised
from birth that refused several attempts at returns to the wild
lives in a large aviary on the property. A couple of exotic birds
fly freely inside the house, occasionally landing on John’s
head to check on what he’s up to in the kitchen. And the
artwork on the walls is largely of raptors rather than
grizzlies.
As Craighead spins his tales
of adventure, from India to the
South Seas, from Washington DC to Yellowstone, son John W. rigs
up fishing tackle for his father. His parents are about to leave
for Florida, where John loves to get up, head for the beach, and
cast into the ocean for hours on end. The outdoors he spent a
lifetime working to protect are now his to enjoy. His days as a
researcher are over.
But if UM’s
Foundation is successful in establishing the
John J. Craighead Chair in Wildlife Biology, his research will go
on.
Vince
Devlin is a reporter for the Missoulian and a
frequent contributor to the Montanan.
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