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Exploring the Wild Kingdom with Marlin

Just as the director of the National Forest Service of Paraguay opened the door to our office, the room went dark as an 8-in rubber band smacked the light switch next to his head. Even though it was a great shot we stopped celebrating. ¿¡¿Que pasa aqui?!? ¡Este oficina es un lugar de trabajo! (What’s happening in here? This office is a place of work!) Well, for us this was important work! When your shot turned the lights on or off, you scored. We had devoted the entire day to this task as Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) in Paraguay. After all, we could not be efficient field biologists, charged with discovering and documenting the herps of Paraguay, without honing our expertise in the rubber band lizard-collecting technique. After trying to explain this to the director, Ingeniero Hilario Moreno, he called us into a meeting.

From 1979 to 1982 I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I spent the first year in El Salvador, where my job was to study iguanas and ctenosaurs at Laguna El Jocotal National Park alongside local community members who had become park rangers. I learned Spanish, lived for nine months without electricity and not even an outhouse, became compañeros with my local counterparts, and had an absolute blast marking hundreds of iguanas and ctenosaurs with this band of rangers who wielded their machetes with the precision and ferocity of samurai swordsmen. As war broke out, I witnessed acts of terrorism, bombings, and machete fights, and we found murdered corpses when patrolling the park. It was a profound and emotional year for me. I happened to have malaria when I was one of the last to be evacuated from El Salvador a couple of weeks before Archbishop Romero was assassinated on the steps of the cathedral in San Salvador on 24 March 1980.

I boarded a plane for the second time in my life and headed straight to Paraguay via Miami, where I bought a boom box in the airport. I had been given a unique opportunity that would shape my entire career as a biologist. A couple of PCVs in Paraguay, David and Diane Wood, had conceived the idea that if conservation and environmental education were to make any progress in Paraguay, the country needed a national biological inventory. Paraguay was essentially unstudied by twentieth-century herpetologists. Diane and David arranged partnerships between the government of Paraguay, Peace Corps, US National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), and US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Office of International Affairs. The overarching goal of the project was to create the first Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Paraguay (National Museum of Natural History of Paraguay).

With the National Biological Inventory in place, the stage was set for the initial team of PCVs to work with National Forest Service professionals, Paraguayan university students, and scientists from NMNH and USFWS. These leaders included Drs. Mercedes Foster (Ornithology), Norman J. Scott Jr. (Herpetology), Gary Hartshorn (Botany), Don Wilson (Mammalogy), and Paul Spangler (Entomology). Looking back, I can hardly believe my incredibly good fortune suddenly to be working with some of the most prestigious tropical biologists of the time. Our Paraguayan counterparts included a gifted group of young students, mostly women, including Aida Luz Lucy Aquino, Nancy Lopez, Lidia Perez, and Isabel Gamarra, who all went on to staff and run the Museo Nacional and have great careers. Lucy and I were mentored by Norm, and this is when I became a herpetologist. We have remained close friends and partners in Paraguayan herpetology since our first expedition to Ybycuí National Park in March 1980. From that point, my purpose in life was to get into the field as much as possible, venturing to remote places and collecting specimens for the yet-to-be museum. We were consumed with discovery, natural history, and identifying what we found. We thought this was essential for any kind of conservation to take place. How could you do conservation and environmental education if you had no idea what species were in Paraguay? How could we integrate the rich Indigenous knowledge, including all the Guaraní names for species? After Latin and Greek, Guaraní is the third most common language in scientific nomenclature, and many species had Guaraní names long before Linnaean names. A new national museum would be the center of it all. I’ve had many adventures, but these collecting expeditions in Paraguay will always be the most sublime and enjoyable fieldwork of my life.

The National Biological Inventory was created before the term biodiversity was coined and before Paraguay even considered research and collecting permits. It was the first effort at organized scientific collecting expeditions since the Paraguay Expedition of 1858 and the contributions of Moises Santiago Bertoni (1857–1929). Paraguay, and in particular the Gran Chaco, the expansive biome of dry tropical forest that covers an environmental gradient from seasonally flooded wetlands in the east to very dry thornscrub farther west, were very undeveloped in 1980. The Paraguayan Chaco was not deforested, rarely visited by outsiders, and full of wildlife. We regularly interacted with Chacoan peccaries and the two other peccary species, saw Brazilian tapir, anteaters, and pumas regularly, and discovered so many herps that we could not identify. We found Budgett’s Frogs (Lepidobatrachus spp.) and Waxy Monkey Treefrogs (Phyllomedusa sauvagii) and had no idea what they were despite having all the literature Norm could find. Now they are in the pet trade. For us, Paraguay was an open book, and we got to fill in some of the pages. This National Biological Inventory project remains a great success story for the Peace Corps and for the natural sciences in Paraguay. Today Paraguay’s National Museum of Natural History is doing great with its third generation of curators. Paraguay has its own herpetological society, the Asociación Paraguaya de Herpetología.

Back at that meeting that interrupted our busy workday, Ingeniero Moreno informed us that the Servicio Nacional Forestal and Peace Corps had been contacted by Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom TV show, starring Marlin Perkins. This was a big deal, since Wild Kingdom was the longest-running prime-time show on TV from the 1960s through the1980s, and Marlin was a biologist known throughout homes in America. The producer wanted to do an episode featuring PCVs and had gotten wind of the National Biological Inventory. I immediately thought it would be cool if we could demonstrate our skills with rubber bands. The episode would also include Dr. Mercedes Foster, curator of ornithology at the NMNH, who had been deeply involved in the project. Mercedes, a classically trained ornithologist and tropical biologist, was also told by her bosses at USFWS that she would need to use a net-gun in the show (more on that later).

I had no idea how TV shows are made, and I still laugh about it. And cringe about it. The first part was awesome. Suddenly we got to go to the field as much as we wanted to scout locations and catch animals that would be in the show. The setting for the film would be the Gran Chaco. We took the Peace Corps’ pickup to a fantastic ranch, La Golondrina, where Diane and Antonio Espinoza hosted us, and spent days catching herps that we might use in the film. One night I found a Yellow Anaconda (Eunectes notaeus) eating a Wood Stork. We caught Yacaré Caimans (Caiman yacare), 17 species of frogs, and too many other cool snakes to list except for one that cannot go unmentioned—the large, feisty, and hard-biting False Water Cobra (Hydrodynastes gigas). I was always dirty and wore torn T-shirts, short jogging shorts, and Army jungle boots with no socks.

Filming began when Donald Meier Productions sent their cinematographer, Peter Drowne, to build the story line and get all the wildlife shots. I was named as the helper and would be one of the PCVs featured in the show. The first thing that distressed me was Peter and I went to the market, and he bought three identical sets of nice khaki pants and shirts for me to wear at all times while filming. This was not cool. I never dressed that way, especially when working! Once I got over the wardrobe, we had a lot of fun, spending days and days in the field building blinds and waiting for wildlife and using his 16 mm film camera with big reels of film and big old-fashioned batteries and beautiful lenses. I watched him film gray brocket deer eating flowers out of a pond as they fell from a bottle tree. He filmed lots of bird life, such as Jabiru Storks, Maguari Storks, Wood Storks, egrets and herons, and Neotropic Cormorants. The cormorants had converged on the drying ponds to feast on the armored catfish (Hoplosternon spp.). With these shots, Peter developed his storyboard that, of course, had to include the net-gun.

We spent days figuring out what to do about the net-gun. Mercedes had arrived to do her part handling this monstrosity. It is a heavy tripod bolted onto a rifle stock. The legs of the tripod, pointing out, each hold a football-shaped projectile that is attached to a triangular net. When you pull the trigger, three .22 caliber blanks inside the foam footballs shoot the net out, which is supposed to catch a bird on the wing unharmed. Mercedes was to walk around the Chaco being filmed catching birds this way! Great idea, Fish and Wildlife Service!

Thanks to Mercedes, my first publication was A technique for live-trapping cormorants, which has absolutely nothing to do with the net-gun. Stymied by the net-gun, Mercedes suggested we make modified bal-chatri traps with monofilament nooses tied to a flat piece of screen staked to the ground. We did and laughed our butts off as cormorants would waddle up the bank of the pond to sun their wings and get their feet stuck in the nooses. They would just stand there, like, Weird, my feet won’t move. Then we would leave our blind and retrieve a couple. If you ever watch Wild Kingdom’s The Unexplored Gran Chaco, you will see Dr. Mercedes Foster and Paraguayan ornithologist Nancy Lopez—guess what—walking around the Chaco catching cormorants with the net-gun. I still think walking around shooting rubber bands at lizards would have been more authentic.

Marlin Perkins was not just the star of an Emmy Award-winning show, he was an excellent and very well-respected herpetologist. He had been the curator at the Chicago Zoo and then the St. Louis Zoo, where he influenced his field and inspired many people. When I met him in 1981, he was 78 years old and vibrant. The Peace Corps directors held a reception for him at their home in Asunción where we all went to meet him. Marlin was a great storyteller and gentleman, noted for his high-pitched charismatic voice. While a group of us were surrounding him, he said, Let me tell you about the time in 1929 when I survived the bite of a Gaboon Viper! (with emphasis on GabOOON VIPER!). Wow, what a story. He told us they couldn’t detect a pulse after he was bitten, but he lived. We introduced ourselves, and he said, So Lee, are you publishing in herpetology? Me, exhibiting FIS (full imposter syndrome): No, But I want to! Uhhhh, I’m getting pretty good with the rubber bands!

I spent more than a week with Marlin, going to La Golondrina to get some shots. All of this was great fun, and hanging out with Marlin was a hoot. While filming with Marlin, we would walk around posing by trees and bushes to get shots that would be edited into the wildlife shots. These are called look-see, where they film you looking for wildlife, then the scene cuts to the brocket deer eating flowers weeks before and you act like you had just seen it. We used a snake I found and kept in a pillowcase for a rousing scene where Marlin and I chanced upon and wangled this impressive 7-ft plus False Water Cobra. Marlin loved doing that, and he knew what he was doing. I got to fly in a Cessna airplane with Marlin because we had to get some aerial shots for the film, which included me checking on some projects with the National Biological Inventory, sporting my khaki shirt and oversized walkie-talkie. We still howl about that. Getting the shot of us flying over the Chaco preceded Top Gun. At the airport, Marlin and I situated ourselves in the plane. Peter set up his camera on an angle and focused on the cockpit while an assistant shook the wings of the plane to make it look like we were flying and pointing out features on the Chacoan landscape below. That’s acting!

It turns out they know to film these things only on sunny, cloudless days, so that all the shots fit together as if it were one flawless fieldtrip. There was a lot of down time at an obscure locality, Agua Dulce near Cerro León, while waiting for a cloudless day. A group of national park rangers and PCVs was along to participate. It was hot as blazes. We were sitting in our underwear playing poker in the heat of the day when Marlin walked out of the rustic cabin in full-blown Wild Kingdom attire, neatly pressed and looking sharp. In characteristic Marlin inflection: Hello boys! I was wondering if you’d like to take a break from that poker game and hear about my search for the Yeti!, in the Himalayas!, with Sir Edmund Hillary?!? Us, immediately putting down our cards, Yes Marlin! Tell us all about it! Wow again, what another story!

A couple of days later it was over. Marlin was headed directly to Mexico to do another episode. When we were saying goodbye, he asked in his characteristic voice, It’s been great getting to know you, Lee. I’m off next week to go scuba diving with hammerhead sharks in Baja California! Is there anything I can do for you?

I said, Marlin, I haven’t seen my mother in two and a half years and only talked to her by phone twice during all this time. Could you give her a call for me when you get back to the United States?

Why of course, Lee! A few weeks later, after Marlin did the show on hammerhead sharks, he surprised Mom with a call. Hello Mrs. Fitzgerald, this is Marlin Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom! If you have time, I’d be delighted to talk to you about spending time with your son Lee in Paraguay!