Joseph Grinnell (February 27, 1877 – May 29, 1939) 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. Early years Joseph Grinnell was born February 27, 1877, the first of three children by his father Fordyce Grinnell MD and mother Sarah Elizabeth Pratt. Grinnell's father worked as the physician for the Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita Indian Agency near Fort Sill, Oklahoma. His distant cousins included the Massachusetts politician Joseph Grinnell (1788–1885) and George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938) who founded the Audubon Society. The Grinnells moved to the Pine Ridge Indian Agency in 1880. In 1885 the Grinnell family moved to Pasadena, California, but the collapse of Southern California's boom forced Dr. Grinnell in 1888 to accept a position at the Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Carlisle Indian school commander was Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a friend of the Grinnells. Joseph Grinnell worked in a printing shop in Carlisle and collected his first specimen, a toad, before the family returned to Pasadena two years later. First Alaska trip Captain Pratt visited the Grinnells in Pasadena in 1896 while on a new assignment to inspect Indian Schools on the Pacific coast up to Alaska. The captain obtained permission from the family to take young Grinnell with him. Grinnell sent home bird specimens of the San Francisco Bay area, en route to Alaska. Captain Pratt completed his assignment and returned home. Grinnell remained in Alaska and continued collecting with the assistance of the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Haines, Alaska. Grinnell went on field trips throughout the area, including remote Saint Lazaria Island. An unintended overnight stay on the island enabled him to study storm-petrels, an account of which he published in the March 1897 issue of the Nidologist, an early publication of the Cooper Ornithological Club. Grinnell's expanding