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.