By this time reptiles and amphibians had become my central interest. The fauna of the region would excite passion in a herpetologist of any age. Forty species of snakes, one of the richest assemblages in the world, are native to the western Florida panhandle and adjacent border counties of Alabama. Over a period of a year I managed to capture most of them. And a majority of those I could not take alive I either saw at a distance, such as the marsh-dwelling flat-tailed water snake (Natrix compressicauda), or else were brought to me dead, most memorably a large diamondback rattlesnake killed by a group of men not far from our house.
On the western edge of Brewton, next to a dense swamp, was a goldfish hatchery run by an affable sixty-year-old Englishman named Mr. Perry. I never learned his first name; polite southern youth did not address their elders in such familiar terms. Nor did I ask him how he came to such an unusual occupation in a backwater southern town. But we became good friends and spent hours talking freely on many subjects. He was always glad to see me when I rode my bicycle up to the edge of the property. He never had other visitors that I saw, lived quietly with his wife in a small house on the property, and always worked alone. His water came from artesian wells that have since dried up, and he fed his goldfish cornmeal mixed with pig blood received weekly from a local slaughterhouse. The goldfish were sold for bait, both locally and out of town. His canisters of young fish, some monochromatic gold, others gold marbled with white, departed at regular intervals by rail from the Brewton station.
Perry had excavated the ponds, each twenty to thirty feet square, in an irregular double row along the edge of the swamp. Thick weeds choked their borders, and tall trees walled them in on the swamp side. A six-foot-wide stream of artesian water flowed into the swamp from each end of the hatchery. The whole ensemble was a textbook diagram from an ecology textbook made literal: the rich nutrients pumped in continuously gave birth to an exuberance of algae, aquatic plants, and fish. The net produce of biomass fed swarms of insects and thence of frogs, snakes, herons, and other larger predators; and all the excess food and all the waste draining into the exit streams fructified the biota of a deep swamp that stretched east for an indeterminate distance.
Into this paradise I threw myself with abandon. The hours I spent there were among the happiest of my life. At every opportunity I came down to the hatchery ponds. After talking with Mr. Perry for a while, mostly about his pisciculture and my own explorations, I donned calf-length rubber boots from the row of pairs he kept in his equipment shed and walked into my private world. At home I politely ignored the nagging of my stepmother, who seemed almost distraught at my failure to find a job after school. I in turn grew increasingly abashed and resentful at her singleminded efforts to prepare me for the grim Depression-era life she had experienced. I had already worked longer hours than she, I had proved myself, and now I needed space. Pearl saw little value in my swamp expeditions, and, looking back, I cannot blame her.
Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind descends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering. When I focused on the ponds and swamp lying before me, I abandoned all sense of time. Net in hand, khaki collecting satchel hung by a strap from my shoulder, I surveilled the edges of the ponds, poked shrubs and grass clumps, and occasionally waded out into shallow stretches of open water to stir the muddy bottom. Often I just sat for long periods scanning the pond edges and vegetation for the hint of a scaly coil, a telltale ripple on the water’s surface, the sound of an out-of-sight splash. Then, sooner on hot days than otherwise, I worked my way down for a half-mile or so along one of the effluent streams into the deep shade of the swamp, crossed through the forest to the parallel stream, and headed back up it to the hatchery. Sometimes I cut away to explore pools and mudflats hidden in the Piranesian gloom beneath the high closed canopy. In the swamp I was a wanderer in a miniature wilderness. I never encountered another person there, never heard a distant voice, or automobile, or airplane. The only tracks in the mud I saw were those of wild animals. No one else cared about this domain, not even Mr. Perry. Although I held no title, the terrain and its treasures belonged entirely to me in every sense that mattered.
Water snakes abounded at abnormally high densities around the ponds and along the outflow streams, feeding on schools of bloodgorged fish and armies of frogs. Mr. Perry made no attempt to control them. They were, he said, no more than a minor source of goldfish mortality. Although neither of us had the vocabulary to express such things, we shared the concept of a balanced ecosystem, one in which man could add and take out energy but otherwise leave alone without ill consequence. Mr. Perry was a natural-born environmentalist. He trod lightly upon the land in his care.
A swamp filled with snakes may be a nightmare to most, but for me it was a ceaselessly rotating lattice of wonders. I had the same interest in the diversity of snakes that other fifteen-year-old boys seemed automatically to develop in the years and makes of automobiles. And knowing them well, I had no fear. On each visit I found something new. I captured live specimens, brought them home to cages I had constructed of wood and wire mesh, and fed them frogs and minnows I collected at the hatchery.
My favorites included the eastern ribbon snakes, graceful reptiles decorated with green and brown longitudinal stripes, which spent their time draped in communal bunches on tree limbs overhanging the pond waters. With their bulging, lidless eyes they could see at a considerable distance and were wary. I stalked them to within a few feet by wading in the shallow water of the pond edges and seized one or two at a time as they plunged into the water and tried to swim away. They grew tame in captivity and fed readily on small frogs. Green water snakes were memorable in another way. Found lying half-concealed in vegetation at the edge of the ponds, they were big, up to four feet in length, and heavy-bodied. Catching one was an unpleasant experience unless I could take them quickly back of the head. Most larger snakes try to bite when first handled, and many can break the skin to leave a horseshoe row of needle pricks; but green water snakes have an especially violent response, and their sharp teeth can slash the skin and make blood run freely. They were also difficult to maintain in captivity. Once I found a mud snake, a species that uses the hardened tip of its tail to help hold giant amphiuma salamanders while subduing and swallowing them. The tip can prick human skin; hence the species’ alternate name of stinging snake.
One species, the glossy watersnake Natrix rigida, became a special target just because it was so elusive. The small adults lay on the bottom of shallow ponds well away from the shore and pointed their heads out of the alga-green water in order to breathe and scan the surface in all directions. I waded out to them very slowly, avoiding the abrupt lateral movements to which reptiles are most sensitive. I needed to get within three or four feet in order to dive and grab them by the body, but before I could close the distance they always pulled their heads under and slipped quietly away into the deeper, opaque waters. I finally solved the problem with the aid of the town’s leading slingshot artist, a taciturn loner my age who liked me because I praised his skills as a hunter. He aimed pebbles at the heads of the snakes with surprising accuracy, stunning several long enough for me to seize them underwater. After they recovered, I kept the captives for a while in the homemade cages, where they thrived on live minnows offered in dishes of water.
The tigers and lords of this place were the poisonous cottonmouth moccasins, large semiaquatic pit vipers with thick bodies and triangular heads. Young individuals, measuring eighteen inches or so, are brightly patterned with reddish-brown crossbands. The adults are more nearly solid brown, with the bands mostly faded and confined to the lower sides of the body. When cornered, moccasins throw open their jaws, sheathed fangs projecting forward, to reveal a conspicuous white mouth lining, the source of their name. Peterson’s A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern and Central North America, written by the herpetologist Roger Conant, warns, “Don’t ever han
dle a live one!” I did so all the time, with the fifteen-year-old’s naive confidence that I would never make a mistake.
Immature cottonmouths were never a problem, but one day I met an outsized adult that might easily have killed me. As I waded down one of the hatchery outflow streams, a very large snake crashed through the vegetation close to my legs and plunged into the water. I was especially startled by the movement because I had grown accustomed through the day to modestly proportioned frogs, snakes, and turtles quietly tensed on mudbanks and logs. This snake was more nearly my size as well as violent and noisy—a colleague, so to speak. It sped with wide body undulations to the center of the shallow watercourse and came to rest on a sandy riffle. It was the largest snake I had ever seen in the wild, more than five feet long with a body as thick as my arm and a head the size of my fist, only a bit under the published size record for the species. I was thrilled at the sight, and the snake looked as though it could be captured. It now lay quietly in the shallow clear water completely open to view, its body stretched along the fringing weeds, its head pointed back at an oblique angle to watch my approach. Cottonmouths are like that, even the young ones. They don’t always undulate away until they are out of sight, in the manner of ordinary watersnakes. Although no emotion can be read in the frozen half-smile and staring yellow eyes, their reactions and postures give them an insolent air, as if they see their power reflected in the caution of human beings and other sizable enemies.
I moved into the snake handler’s routine: pinned the body back of the head, grasped the neck behind the swelling masseteric muscles, and lifted the snake clear of the water. The big cottonmouth, so calm to that moment, reacted with stunning violence. Throwing its heavy body into convulsions, it twisted its head and neck slightly forward through my tightened fingers and stretched its mouth wide open to unfold inch-long fangs. A fetid musk from its anal glands filled the air. In the few seconds we were locked together the morning heat became more noticeable, reality crashed through, and at last I awoke from my dream and wondered why I was in that place alone. If I were bitten, who would find me? The snake began to turn its head far enough to clamp its jaws on my hand. I was not strong even for a boy of my slight size, and I was losing control. Reacting as by reflex, I heaved the giant out into the brush, and it thrashed frantically away, this time until it was out of sight and we were rid of each other.
This narrow escape was the most adrenaline-charged moment of my year’s adventures at the hatchery. Since then I have cast back, trying to retrieve my emotions to understand why I explored swamps and hunted snakes with such dedication and recklessness. The activities gave me little or no heightened status among my peers; I never told anyone most of what I did. Pearl and my father were tolerant but not especially interested or encouraging; in any case I didn’t say much to them either, for fear they would make me stay closer to home. My reasons were mixed. They were partly exhilaration at my entry into a beautiful and complex new world. And partly possessiveness; I had a place that no one else knew. And vanity; I believed that no one, anywhere, was better at exploring woods and finding snakes. And ambition; I dreamed I was training myself someday to be a professional field biologist. And finally, an undeciphered residue, a yearning remaining deep within me that I have never understood, nor wish to, for fear that if named it might vanish.
Too quickly the enchanted interlude came to an end. In the late spring of 1945, a few weeks after sirens blew across the little town to celebrate the surrender of Germany, we moved again, to the city of Decatur, in north central Alabama. This time I yielded to the pertinacity of my stepmother and found work. In the ensuing year I held a series of jobs: paperboy, lunch-counter attendant and short-order cook at a downtown drugstore, stock clerk at a five-and-ten department store, and finally, in the summer of 1946, just before leaving for college, office boy in a nearby steel manufacturing plant. My income rose steadily with each step, to about twenty-five dollars a week. All this was good for my soul—maybe. I know it made Pearl happy; but, more important, it persuaded me to strive thereafter to my limit in order to go any distance, master any subject, take any risk to become a professional scientist and thereby avoid having to do such dull and dispiriting labor ever, ever again.
I managed to continue my relationship with Nature on a part-time basis that summer and fall. On warm days when I could get away from school and work I wandered the banks and tributary streams of the Tennessee River to the north and east of Decatur. Surrounded by one of the richest variegations of aquatic environment in North America, I took an interest in freshwater ecology. I discovered and studied sponges and the odd larvae of the spongillaflies that live in them. Soon after my arrival I learned, to my delight, that a local research station of the Tennessee Valley Authority had a complete collection of local freshwater fishes (Alabama has more kinds than any other state). After ingratiating myself with the personnel, I set out to learn this fauna species by species. The Tennessee Valley is also riddled with limestone caverns. I heard of one cave close enough to reach by bicycle and began exploring it in search of bats and blind subterranean insects. I shed most of my immediate interest in snakes, those in the Tennessee Valley being less diverse and harder to find than the ones in southern Alabama.
To my relief, there was no hope of playing football; the high school in Decatur was much larger than the one in Brewton and well peopled with natural athletes. There was no point in even showing up for practice; most male students did not. Thus I was spared the humiliation of my physical inadequacy.
Suddenly, in the fall of 1945, having reached sixteen years of age and with college only a year away, I recognized that I must get serious about my career as an entomologist. The time had come to select a group of insects on which I could become a world authority. Butterflies were out; they were too well known and were being studied by a great many obviously capable scientists. Flies looked much more promising. They occur everywhere in dazzling variety, and they have environmental importance. I liked their clean looks, acrobatics, and insouciant manner. Although houseflies and dung flies, not to mention mosquitoes, have given the dipterous clan a bad name, most species are little jewels in nature’s clockwork, fastidious, unobtrusive, and efficient at what they do, which is scavenging, pollinating flowers, or preying on other insects. I was especially taken by long-legged flies of the family Dolichopodidae, many of which are metallic green and blue and skitter about on leaves in the sunshine like animated gemstones. More than a thousand species in North America were known at that time, and hundreds more were undoubtedly waiting to be discovered. I set out to order the equipment I needed to collect these insects: killing jar, Schmitt specimen boxes, and the special long black insect pins made chiefly in Czechoslovakia. But it was 1945; Czechoslovakia had recently been a war zone and was soon to fall under Soviet occupation. No pins were available.
Without pause I cast about for another group of insects in which to invest my energies, one that could be preserved in small bottles of alcohol obtained locally. I quickly hit upon ants. Of course, ants: my old acquaintances, the source of some of my earliest passions. From a local drugstore I purchased dozens of five-dram prescription bottles, the old-fashioned glass ones with metal screwtops, and filled them with rubbing alcohol. I ordered a copy of William Morton Wheeler’s 1910 classic Ants: Their Structure, Development, and Behavior from a Decatur bookstore, built glass observation nests to the author’s specifications, and prepared to launch my career as a myrmecologist. I rode my bicycle into the woods and fields all around Decatur, building a sizable collection of species and annotating the habitat and nests of each. Such museum series have lasting value. To this day, nearly fifty years later, I still occasionally consult my early Alabama specimens and notes on questions of classification and ecology. I have studied ants in European museums that were collected as early as 1832. They are all beautifully preserved, their exoskeletons as complete and finely sculptured as in life.
About this time I learned of a myrmecologist nam
ed Marion R. Smith who worked at the National Museum of Natural History. I knew that he was a middle-aged gentleman who had grown up in Mississippi and devoted his early research to the ants of that state. In a laboriously typed letter I announced my intention to conduct a survey of the ants of Alabama. Without a pause Smith wrote back to say, Good idea! He himself, he informed me, had surveyed the ants of Mississippi, and he enclosed a copy of a binary taxonomic key he had written to identify the species known from that state. In such keys you follow the specimen through a succession of two-way choices until you arrive at one that tells you the name of the species. Here, for example, is the beginning of the key to the ant genus Monomorium from William S. Creighton’s classic 1950 monograph on the ants of North America. I have changed some words to make the language less technical:
The three terminal joints of the antenna (“feeler”) thicken successively toward the tip of the antenna; workers in a given colony are all about the same size….….….….….…… Go to 2 OR
The first two of these joints are about equal in size; workers in each colony are of two sizes….….….Monomorium destructor
The head is densely covered with small punctures, which make its surface dull; a common house ant in the United States (“Pharaoh’s ant”) ….….….….…….Monomorium pharaonis OR
The head has only scattered punctures, its entire surface shiny….….….….….….….….….….….….….. Go to 3
Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition Page 8