author
Harold Warren Dobyns
1896–1984
A longtime predator-control specialist in the American West, he co-wrote a practical 1937 U.S. Department of Agriculture guide on locating coyote dens. His surviving published work offers a direct look at early federal wildlife-control methods and field experience.
1 Audiobook
Den Hunting as a Means of Coyote Control
by Stanley Paul Young, Harold Warren Dobyns
About the author
Born in Oregon in 1896, Harold Warren Dobyns is best remembered today for co-authoring Den Hunting as a Means of Coyote Control with Stanley P. Young. The booklet was issued in October 1937 as USDA Leaflet No. 132 and identifies Dobyns as assistant leader in the Section of Predator and Rodent Control, Division of Game Management, Bureau of Biological Survey.
Contemporary notices and later records suggest that Dobyns spent much of his life in eastern Oregon and worked closely with predator-control operations. An Oregon obituary described him as one of the first people to use an airplane in predator-control work, which fits the practical, field-based perspective of his published writing.
Dobyns died in January 1984 at age 87. Although little biographical material appears to survive online, his writing remains of historical interest as a document of how federal wildlife management was carried out in the early twentieth century.