A Love Letter to My Trusty Field Guide

A lot of old-timers in field herping circles often credit their trusty old field guide they had when they were young kids when explaining their love of reptiles and amphibians.  There's something about an old field guide that just warms your heart.  A field guide to a child was like a cheat sheet for finding reptiles and amphibians in the wild.  You'd have this book that contained information on every kind of frog, salamander, lizard, snake, and turtle that could be found in your area and beyond.  Then it practically gave you directions on how to find them, by describing the habitat and habits of each species.

Well, I'm not an old-timer (yet, I think?), but I do consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a time where the Internet was still in its infancy and not a household word, and where the only ways to pursue knowledge on herps was through books, magazines, and resources of that nature.  I love the Internet.  I think the Internet was the best thing to happen to the developed world.  But the Internet contains so much information - endless, in fact - that it's hard for me to imagine opportunities for kids today to use investigative skills to unlock intriguing information that formed the basis of daydreams I had as a kid.  Information is consumed only as fast as one can receive it, and as a kid it was slow and steady.  There was much more time for reflection then than there is today.  Maybe someone will read this and completely disagree with that statement.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Cognitive bias or not, there's no refuting the value of good old-fashioned hard-copy literature in the days when it was the end-all-be-all for rabid curiosity-seekers.

As a young kid, I had some of the older, tiny pocket field guides like the Golden Guides.  I read them over and over again until the cover and/or back fell off.  In retrospect, the information contained within them was very basic.  To me, it was more about looking at the drawings of snakes I hoped to find someday.

But one particular book changed my outlook on herping forever.  It was gifted to me by my Uncle and Aunt from California, for my birthday in 1995.  It was the third edition of the Peterson Field Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern/Central North America, by Roger Conant and Joseph Collins.  My precious new acquisition was brand new and tightly-bound, and on the cover was an iconic photograph of a pine barrens tree frog.  I was so excited I could barely contain myself.  I probably ran off with it and shut the door to my room so as to block any distractions that would impede my fantasies.



In fact, the book came in handy A LOT.  I took it everywhere I went, even on trips where I wasn't expecting to go herping.  I  took it just in case.  Every time I traveled somewhere new, I'd take it in hopes of using it to help identify species new to me.  It became my Bible - the field herper's Bible.  It was the final word when it came to searching for, identifying, handling, and recording herps.

Of course, over time, I became quite proficient at identifying herps - so much, that I found that I was using the field guide less and less.  You can only use it so much when you're traveling throughout the Midwest.  The book set out to teach me and it succeeded.  It never was in jeopardy of leaving my possession - to this day it occupies a very prominent place on my bookshelves.  It stands next to a book that I consider to be far inferior - the fourth edition of the same publication (long story but it's a mess of a book).  I love my old copy of the third edition.  It's like an old friend that wants to remind me of the carefree days when I was a kid spending hours catching frogs and snakes.  It's the only book I own with snake musk and toad urine stains in it.

I think the point of this post is that material goods are always secondary to experiences, but do not underestimate the inspiration that may be sparked by a good book.  The effect this book had/has on me transcends paper and ink and glue.

Beyond the graves

The following is a little story about life and death, but also about the good things that can transpire if only we cared enough about ourselves, others, and the environment.

The story begins with a proposition from Nathan Kutok.  A budding naturalist and ecologist, Nathan has been working and volunteering with local herps and natural areas over the last year or so.  He hails from McHenry County, in an area rich in open space with lots of rolling terrain and farmland.  While surveying for snakes at a preserve near him home, he was introduced to adjacent landowners, who had been in the process of "naturalizing" their sizable property to act as a buffer for the preserve, and for their own interests and well being.  While scouting the private property, the landowners informed him of a very old graveyard on the property.  Nathan took a photo of one of the headstones and sent it to me.  Naturally, I was really excited about this.  Early private cemeteries are far and few between, since most have been relocated to larger communal cemeteries or just completely lost to time.  After I inquired about seeing the headstones myself, the landowners agreed to allow us to visit their place.  So it wasn't long before I made the trip up north to meet Nathan and to view the old headstones and graveyard.

July 7th was an absolutely gorgeous day - you couldn't ask for a better day.  I met Nathan at the property in the morning, and we immediately began flipping cover boards he had previously placed out into a grassy field (I hesitate to call it "prairie", as it mostly consisted of Eurasian grasses, probably a remnant from the days when it was grazed by livestock).  A single snake was found - a young Storeria dekayi - before we noticed the landowners approach us from near the house.  The landowners, a wonderful couple originally from my old neighborhood in Chicago as chance would have it, were gracious enough to spend time with us, leading a tour of their property.  As they pointed out all of the restoration that has occurred over the last 17 years, it became clear to me that these people were real salt of the earth folks.  They didn't strike me as being overly concerned with worldly goods, with bitter politics, or with vanity.  They loved being close to nature and teaching people about history, and their philosophies regarding nature, conservation psychology, and connectivity.  It reminded me how easily we can become so completely wrapped up with stupid, meaningless issues and unwarranted stress in our everyday lives when we just don't spend enough time outdoors.

We reached the first of several headstones, a slab of limestone set so deep into the ground that only a portion of the engraving was legible.  As it turns out, all of the headstones that remained at or near their original location were in the same state of submersion; the landowners believe the stones had been knocked down long ago by clumsy cows, and over the years they simply began to sink down into the soil.

One of the headstones (which I unfortunately did not photograph) was for a woman named Olive.  Olive died at the age of 31 on November 1st, 1856.  On November 13, the Woodstock Sentinel carried the following notice: "Mrs. Chauncy Brandoe, of Alden, in this county, died very suddenly on Saturday night, the 1st inst.  She retired at the usual time, in apparently perfect health, and at daylight was found dead by her husband, who spoke to her, without a suspicion until then, that anything unusual had taken place.  A post-mortem examination, made by Dr. J.F. Hamilton, of this place, proved that she died of disease of the heart."  An inscription on her stone reads:

"When midnight darkness fills the skies,
And death and darkness reigns, 
I had my bonny bride torn from my side"

Coincidentally, the Olive stone was uncovered by restorationists on November 1st, 2003 - 147 years to the day she died.

What I found interesting was that though there was a small concentration of graves near where the original house stood long ago, there was one grave by itself a little down a hill near a modern driveway.  I couldn't make out the writing but I was told it was for a young girl.  Why was this grave site so far from the others?  I thought that maybe the stone had been moved at some point.  Later, I leaned that the graveyard began as a family plot but grew through the mid-1800s to include non-relatives.  Once the larger town cemetery was established nearby, families began moving bodies to that cemetery.  Around 1885, the little graveyard was abandoned, leaving only the original family members' graves on site.  The little girl by the driveway could have been a family member buried away from the family, or a non-family member who remained following the opening of the new cemetery.

Finally, we found our way to several small and broken pieces of headstones that were propped up against a good-sized glacial erratic.  The landowners explained to me that when they first purchased the land, they carried out some rearranging and clean up of the property.  When they pried up some stepping stones near their house, they were surprised to find out that the stepping stones were actually inverted headstones.  Someone at some point thought that using headstones as stepping stones was a good idea?  It made me scratch my head.  How hard would it have been to ethically source some conventional stepping stones?  Regardless, the landowners decided to return the headstones to the family grave area, but without knowing where the bodies are located, the stones were simply left in the general area.

Today, what's left of the family cemetery is concealed by a prairie restoration, which makes finding the headstones difficult in the summer.  The landowners were kind enough to send me photos they took during the spring or fall, when they stones were not covered in vegetation.  There are also several very large and old oak trees, certainly predating the homestead.  There are enough historic elements remaining to create a feeling of connectivity with the past, which really is an incredible thing to experience.

Of course, Nathan and I eventually resumed our search for herps and ultimately came away with about four species, including a group of grey treefrog (Hyla versicolor/chrysoscelis complex) tadpoles in an absolutely outstanding wetland the owners transformed from a goldfish pond the previous owners installed.

Nathan has since made additional trips to the site, and I plan on returning before the end of the season to help document herp species and distribution.  Any trip I make back there, however, will not be without a stroll through the old graveyard.

The Fox

Seven years ago yesterday, I was sitting in the back office of Chicagoland Canoe Base, at 4019 North Narragansett in Chicago, meeting with the venerable Ralph Frese, longtime owner and respected environmentalist and historian.  I had scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the nearby Dunning-Read Conservation Area, a natural area at which I was working in order to complete my internship.  Our meeting was supposed to last an hour or less, but we went off on tangents and ended up talking for nearly four hours.  At one point, Ralph began talking about a project he was involved in during the early 70s, one that has become legendary in the field of local canoeing.  He asked if I was familiar with the re-enactment of the Jolliet-Marquette voyage that was carried out on the tricentennial year of 1973.  I said no, which led to him rolling his eyes slightly.  He huffed, got up, walked to a disorganized bookshelf, and pulled out a box containing a book about the re-enactment.  It was photo-heavy, full of grainy 70s photos of men wearing period clothing, riding and portaging primitive-looking canoes.  As it turns out, it was a pretty big deal at the time.  Ralph had been commissioned to build and supply canoes for the voyage, and it became clear that while talking with him (mostly listening to him), that this was a highlight of Ralph's illustrious career.  Decades later, he was careful not to bend or fold the pages of the book.  And when we had paged through the entire thing, Ralph carefully placed the book back into its commemorative box, and back onto the shelf it went.

Ralph was aware of my internship project and major.  He had pointed out that one of the participants of this reenactment was an old friend of his named Jim Phillips, and asked me if I had ever heard of "The Fox".   I sort of sat with a blank look on my face because I had no clue what he was talking about.  Again slightly miffed, he proceeded to tell me about this Fox.  The Fox was a mysterious character, who, during the late 60s through the early 80s, became an environmental activist after witnessing illegal pollution go unenforced by relatively uninterested rural law enforcement agencies.  He secretly committed acts of nonviolent protest against polluting industries and used the media coverage as fuel to tighten laws governing waste disposal.  Over the course of many years, he was responsible for countless acts of what some consider environmental terrorism - plugging up factory sewage outfalls resulting in backups and damage to equipment, placing caps on smoke stacks, and dumping buckets of ripe road-killed skunks and toxic waste into lobbies of companies he knew were violating pollution standards.  All the while, nobody except for his closest confidants knew the true identity of the Fox.  His calling card was usually a note, signed "Fox", the "O" being a customized logo of a fox head.

When I heard all of this, I knew right away this was someone I wanted to learn more about.  It was my lucky day, since Ralph had copies of The Fox's book, "Raising Kane" for sale in the store.  I bought a copy, and it remains one of the more inspiring books I have.  Had I known that this would be the last time I'd see Ralph, I would have thanked him graciously for his time.  Ralph was a sweet man, but hard-nosed, and I was always trying to play it cool with him.  He was secretly battling cancer, and passed away less than seven months later, on December 10, 2012, at the age of 86.

In early April of this year, the company I work for relocated me to a location in Montgomery, not far from the Fox River.  It occurred to me that I was now working very close to the site of perhaps the Fox's most infamous exploit - the old Dial soap factory on Aucutt Road.  This was the Fox's first foray into direct action activities.  After learning that the toxic soap scum he saw in a nearby creek came from the soap factory, and finding dead animals in and around the creek, he plugged up the sewage outfall several times under the cover of nightfall, causing major backups which eventually caught the attention of authorities.  Today, the factory sits mostly silent, as production was halted last year due to lackluster sales of bar soap.  The surrounding landscape has changed drastically since 1969 - the year the Fox first hit the factory.  In his book, he describes the surrounding area as prairie and woods, but today those areas have mostly been filled in with more industry.  The creek, though, appears to be reasonably clean - at least, there doesn't appear to be "dirty grey soap curds, rancid fats, septic water, and a variety of scented esters", as the Fox had described.  This is due largely to the actions of the Fox.

I've attempted to locate the exact location of the outfall, as well as other spots described in Raising Kane, but haven't been able to.  Of course, these events occurred fifty years ago, and much has changed, so the outfall may not even exist now.  But a lunch break trip to the Little White School Museum in Oswego tipped me off to the existence of a memorial to Jim Phillips and the selfless work he put in to bring awareness to pollution of the Fox River.  This memorial is located at Violet Patch Park, a short stretch of riverside designed for passive recreation.  I decided to head that way to see the memorial on Wednesday, June 26th.

Today, the Fox River, as seen here from a bridge at Violet Patch Park, is much cleaner than it was fifty years ago.

As a testament to the cleanliness of the river, here is a recently deceased example of spike mussel (Elliptio dilatata), an Illinois species of special concern, found at the park.  The presence of this species here is an indicator of the good quality of water it lives in.  Also seen were examples of elktoe  (Alasmidonta marginata) and round pigtoe (Pleurobema coccineum).

Natricinae

While so many other local snake enthusiasts foam at the mouth at the prospect of searching for and finding big, meaty snakes like bullsnakes, milk snakes, kingsnakes, and such (species I refer to as "big game"), my life-long fascination with the smaller, leaner, and usually rougher-textured snakes has never ever waned.  Don't get me wrong - my appreciation for snakes applies to all species.  But personally, it's the scrappy little garter snakes, the secretive and mysterious Kirtland's snakes, the enigmatic lined snakes, and the pugnacious water snakes that command my attention more so than the others.

These snakes, and others like them, belong in the family Colubridae and subfamily Natricinae.  The local natricines are usually small, lean snakes with keeled scales that impart a rough feel and texture.  Most are strongly associated with water, and many feed at least in part upon aquatic animals like annelids, amphibians, fish, and crayfish.  Though some local natricines are habitat generalists, others are to a degree choosy about where they can live.  In spring, summer, and fall Chicago, one doesn't have to search long and far to find the plains garter snake, a resourceful serpent that has eked out an existence living among weedy railroad rights of way or in backyards.  Finding a Graham's crayfish snake, though, is going to require a lot of research and probably a pair of comfortable waders.

I probably have a soft spot for the snakes in this group because they were the first snakes I saw, captured and kept in captivity when I was really young.  But my fascination for them transcends nostalgia.  Their peculiar habits continue to have me wondering, and in my opinion, the group on the whole is sorely understudied.  Most aren't rare.  Their relative abundance doesn't seem to necessitate conservation measures by governmental organizations.  We take the yellow-striped black snakes for granted because they are pretty stinkin' common.  A lot of the recreational field herpers refer to them as "junk snakes", an asinine gesture if you ask me.

As I get older, I find myself whittling my herpetological focus down to certain groups or certain species.  Natricines are one of those groups, and though they aren't gaudy or aristocratic as defined by the broader contingent of herpetologists, they've got my vote.  There's so much to be learned of the Kirtland's snake's natural history, the queen snake's dietary evolution, the garter snake's pheromonal communication, and the water snake's...attitude.  It is certainly a group of reptiles that brings me joy each day, and one that deserves more attention.