.nas-article.nas-article-full-width .article-body .text-container .bean-image { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } .dropcap { color: #838078; float: left; font-size: 82px; line-height: 60px; padding: 5px 8px 0 0; } Steve Beissinger knows exactly what famed naturalist Joseph Grinnell was doing on June 2, 1932: He was hiking a ridge near Lagunitas, California, with his wife, Hilda. This was no lovers’ picnic. On their 3.5-hour trek, the duo undertook three separate bird counts, and Grinnell tallied each of the 94 birds from 31 species that they saw or heard. Beissinger knows all this because he’s been reading Grinnell’s diaries. Clues gleaned from two pages of neat cursive written 87 years ago led the modern ornithologist with University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) to what he’s certain is the same trail Grinnell investigated. On a May morning, he, his postdoctoral student Kelly Iknayan, and I...