Obituary: Dale Lott, UC Davis professor of Wildlife, Fish, & Conservation Biology

UC Davis professor emeritus Dale Lott, a wise counselor to his colleagues and an irrepressible travel guide to his friends, died Monday, Jan. 26, 2004. He was 70 years old.

Lott’s death, from longstanding pulmonary fibrosis only recently diagnosed, was unexpected. Just last September he led his friends on a canoe trip tracing Lewis and Clark’s route on the Upper Missouri River, and he had recently been working on plans for a new prairie-based wildlife reserve in western Montana as well as a book about that project.

Although he wrote numerous papers and a book on animal behavior in his 31 years at UC Davis, he waited until he retired in 1994 to write a book for general audiences about bison, which were his passion. Characteristically, said longtime colleague Peter Moyle, he prepared thoroughly for the task – in this instance, by taking UC Extension courses in non-fiction writing and working with a group of other writers.

Writing “American Bison” was “my gift to myself in retirement,“ Lott told his wife, Laura. It was published in 2002 by the University of California Press and was well received. “In this rich and enthusiastic narrative, Lott uses exuberant humor and great passion for his subject … [T]he scenes he sketches … bring his story to life,” wrote a book reviewer in the Los Angeles Times.

“The study of bison behavior was his true love and his true academic calling,” said his close friend and colleague Ben Hart. In fact, Lott was born on the National Bison Range, where his grandfather was range superintendent and his father was an employee. Another close friend and colleague, Don Owings, said, “Bison are a theme of not only Dale’s professional life but his personal life as well. He drew from talents he had developed in both and wrote a beautiful book.”

Lott’s decades of studying animal behavior and social organization took him around the world. Besides his bison research, he investigated animal behavior before earthquakes and interactions between nomadic herdsman and their cattle in Kenya, and was one of the first scientists to study the possible impact of tourists on wildlife.

In Rocky Mountain National Park, Lott asked people why they fed the sheep potato chips, even though it was not good for them. “They said that it made them feel like they were better people because the animals trusted them enough to take food from their hands,” Hart recalled.

In Nepal, Lott showed that technologically well-equipped tourists –- those with cameras with telephoto lenses – were content to watch Asian rhinoceroses from afar. Tourists with simpler cameras pushed their Nepalese guides to take them closer to the rhinos, which sometimes forced the animals to stop grazing and take refuge in the forest.

As he traveled, Lott developed a talent for organizing and leading research trips and vacation adventures. He took colleagues and friends to every continent, including Antarctica. In California he led camping and backpacking trips to Mount Whitney, the Lost Coast, Joshua Tree National Park and Death Valley. (“And we walked around the UC Davis Arboretum maybe a thousand times,” said Owings.)

For his 60^th birthday, Lott planned a 60-mile hike with friends across the Vizcaino Desert in Baja California. “It was a mystical trip,” Owings recalled. “We slept among these great yuccas in the sand dunes and once we woke up -- in that dry desert -- totally socked in by fog. We saw an endangered subspecies of pronghorn antelope.

“Dale always made things like that happen.”

An accomplished pilot, Lott often flew colleagues to research sites. “He was so thorough as a flyer,” Peter Moyle recalled. “He seemed to check everything twice. I never knew anyone who was so cautious.”

That maturity served the university many times over the years, Moyle said, especially when Lott was the founding chair of the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. He served as chair for six years, from 1973 to 1979.

“Dale was the godfather of our department and served as a mentor for all of us,” said the current department chair, Dirk Van Vuren.

“Though he wasn’t that much older, he was the grown-up among all us academic children,” Moyle said. “He liked people, liked making sure things worked out. We had some pretty contentious people in the new department but he made sure we got along.”

Lott helped found the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at UC Davis, which has become the largest body of faculty working in animal behavior at any campus in the world.

He was a leader in another forum, too: He was one of the earliest advocates for bicycle traffic lanes and paths in Davis, with his first wife, Donna. This remained a strong interest for Dale and he wrote an opinion article on the topic in September for the Davis Enterprise.

Dale and Donna Lott had one son, Terence, who owns the Newsbeat stores in Davis and Sacramento. Dale Lott met Laura Kim Bell at a course in Sacramento and they were married in 1990.

“The thing I’ll miss most about Dale is having his presence as one of these individuals you thoroughly enjoy talking to,” Moyle concluded. “He was wise. Every time you talked to him you learned something.”

Dale Lott is survived by his wife, Laura K. Lott, of Davis; a son and daughter-in-law, Terence and Janis Lott of Davis; a brother and sister-in-law, Robert and Sue Campbell of Spokane, Wa.; an aunt, Maizie Hermann of Spokane; and his former wife, Donna Lott of Davis.

His family and friends will hold a memorial service at a later date.

In honor of Dale Lott’s dream of establishing a fully functioning prairie ecosystem on the American Plains that would include the reintroduction of wild bison, his family requests that memorial contributions be made to: American Prairie Foundation, PO Box 908, Bozeman, Mont. 59771. For more information, e-mail Dakota@prairiefoundation.org.