41

Why Do I Do What I Do in the Field?

People assume that the wildest field stories will involve a viper, a jaguar, or some horrid mosquito-borne disease. Nope. The most interesting stories revolve around the people one meets while doing our work. Some encounters are wonderful, some are hilarious, and some are terrifying. While romping around remote—and not so remote—areas looking for amphibians and reptiles seems perfectly normal to people like me, to a nonbiologist this is a profoundly weird thing to be doing. We also tend to work late at night, which only exacerbates our weirdness. Many people fear some of our subjects, and most people pay no attention to the innocuous ones. So, a good amount of time is spent explaining oneself to people encountered along the way. Add a language barrier in foreign countries or a deep cultural gulf between the field biologist and local people, and miscommunications can arise.

I suppose I was preadapted to a lifetime of odd encounters with people, given that they started within my own family. There is nothing pleasant about road-killed animals, but they can be valuable as research specimens. So, naturally, I started saving these treasures in the family freezer for the local natural history museum. My mother once thawed out a large, smashed Red Diamond Rattlesnake, having mistaken it for a roast beef. Upon discovery, she abruptly declared, We’re going out for dinner tonight! The next day she taped off a section of the freezer for my exclusive use. I had very supportive parents, but at dinner I got the question: Tell us again, why do you do this? I’ve now spent a career responding to that same question.

The strangeness of our pursuits is magnified when visiting other cultures. When poking around the outskirts of villages looking for animals, in Mexico for example, it is polite and smart to spend considerable time introducing yourself and trying to explain what you are doing to local folks. Like their rural counterparts everywhere, these folks usually consider amphibians and reptiles with antipathy or utter disregard. The communications challenge is not simply explaining what I am doing but convincing them to believe me. Why would a gringo travel all the way to their remote corner of the world, brave hordes of mosquitoes at night in the swamp that nobody enters, just to look for frogs? After years of trying, and generally failing, to provide an answer that made any sense to people, I settled on a storyline that seems to work. I explain that I am a teacher in the United States and I want my students to understand something about the beauty of their country, but I can’t bring all the students with me. Instead, I spend my summers collecting samples to share with them so they can compare them with the creatures they know, and they learn something about both countries. This is actually very close to the truth, so I’m happy with my strategy. Before I came up with my storyline, however, I had some mis-steps.

In the 1980s, Guatemala was mired in a horrific civil war, and I ventured right into the middle of it to look for toads. In my youthful ignorance I didn’t realize that the US government had played a foundational covert role in starting this decades-old conflict. Most of the locals around the coffee farm I frequented clearly were spooked by my presence. The few that would speak to me simply refused to believe that I was just looking for toads and snakes. I slowly pieced together that everyone assumed that I was a CIA operative with a ridiculously unbelievable cover story. That trip culminated in a terrifying encounter with armed villagers in the middle of the night. My conversations at this study site never got to why I was doing my work because no one believed what I was doing was real. Imagine a US citizen going to Afghanistan today and wandering around catching lizards, and you’ll see the folly in my approach.

Another communications failure involved a Mexican colleague and myself making the poor decision to climb over a fence late at night to survey a patch of remnant cloud forest in Veracruz, Mexico. Rule 1 of field work: never cross a fence without permission. Rule 2: never survey an area at night without first scouting it out during daylight and introducing yourself to the locals. Jaguars and vipers are not the biggest threats. Spooked locals who cannot possibly guess why two people with headlights are wandering around their property in the middle of the night are the threat. We succeeded in finding the lizard that my friend needed, so it was a great night until we heard shouting. And dogs. Someone angrily demanded to know what we were doing on his property. He had no flashlight, so we could not determine his location. Our headlamps were obvious, so he knew exactly where we were. My colleague shouted back details about his government-funded scientific research on the evolution of anole lizards. Importantly here, there was no language barrier because I was not doing the talking. This guy also had a shotgun. In response to my friend’s eloquent description, he responded with Bullshit. You’re stealing my cattle! and fired at us. I could hear pellets hitting leaves around me, and the dogs were getting closer as we ran, terrified and disoriented, through the forest hoping to clear the fence before he killed us. It is not easy to run through a cloud forest at night. In a shocking bit of hubris, the next morning we returned because this patch of forest was too valuable to be ignored. We introduced ourselves properly, gave a better explanation, and apologized profusely for trespassing the night before. He was really nice and let us camp on his property for a couple of days. Lessons duly learned.

When all goes well, and you can convince people that you are not insane or involved in subterfuge, local folks can be invaluably helpful and fun. While they may not know all the local animals, they do know the local trails and can give you great tips on the area. I often carry a deck of flashcards with pictures of the animals I am seeking. It’s like a bad detective show: Excuse me sir, have you seen this snake? Kids especially will delight in helping you chase common lizards. If you give them a flashlight and a sack, they will deliver you a load of frogs each morning. It is a well-known trick of tropical herpetologists to travel with coins to pay kids a bounty for their finds. Some kids are really good at this, and you can greatly improve your efforts with an army of them on the payroll. There always is a bit of financial bargaining involved, and the size of the creature, rather than the rarity or novelty, tends to drive the price. So, I have paid good money for loads of enormous Cane Toads that I did not need in order to scoop up the occasional great find that a kid brings in. One advantage about working with kids is that they don’t care about why you want these animals. They are just having fun and earning some change.

Yet, miscommunications happen. I once watched a group of small boys struggling to haul a big burlap sack into my camp. The sack was bouncing crazily, loaded with a whole lot of something that was unhappy to be in there. I was suspicious, and when I asked the kids what was in there, they explained proudly how many rats they had for me. I re-explained to them that I wanted lizards and frogs and certainly not rats. I paid them a bit for their evident efforts and convinced them not to open the sack right there. I have no idea how they managed to catch so many rats. And I don’t know if I failed to communicate my interests to them or if they were just trying to pull one over on me. Similarly, in Veracruz, Mexico, one morning, I awoke in the back of my truck with the sense that someone was out there, so I emerged and found a guy I had met on the trail the day before. He was holding an enormous, gorgeous Keel-Billed Toucan. I thanked him and re-explained that I was looking for toads, not toucans, and encouraged him to release it. It flew off happily, he walked away nonplussed, and I have no idea how he managed to catch that bird.

Most people will not capture a live snake for you, but they love it when you will remove snakes for them. These people don’t care why you want the snake and are just grateful you will take it away. This sounds like a great plan, until people rush into your camp in a frenzy, demanding that you follow them to collect this big snake they have found. You run after them, only to discover that the snake had been there days ago or even last year. To be polite, I’ll look around for the long-disappeared snake and then apologize that I failed to help. Once in a while, however, there really is a snake. I followed a frantic group of people a long way from my camp to their village where a crowd had gathered at the base of a large palm tree. Pointing up excitedly, they indicated a large nonvenomous Tropical Chicken Snake in the tree. I wanted that snake, and they clearly wanted it gone. I cannot climb palm trees and, if any of these folks could do so, they were not admitting it. Not at all believing that my plan would work, I started hefting large fallen palm fronds up toward the snake to dislodge it. It worked and suddenly about 7 ft of angry serpent rained down on me. The crowd scattered, screaming. The snake landed on my shoulders and quickly took off into the grass. I managed to grab it, and it began biting me and thrashing around violently. I got a hand behind its head, so the biting stopped, but I was not controlling the thrashing until the snake suddenly wrapped itself around the length of my leg. I realized this was a blessing because it stopped thrashing. I made the long walk back to my camp, marching through the center of their village stooped over holding the head of a very large black and yellow snake covering my entire leg, looking like a barber pole. This made for quite a parade with a line of dancing kids waving those useful palm fronds and shouting. I was the freak at the center of the parade. This scene was so bizarre that I well recall thinking to myself at the time, Why do I do this for a living? The peoples’ reactions were so joyful with hilarity that I thought to myself, maybe I do this because it is fun! I honestly think they were laughing too hard to even bother with wondering why I was doing this.

After a field season, it’s rewarding to think about the amazing animals encountered and the new discoveries. But it’s the people I encounter that leave the greatest impression on me. As often as I tell these stories to my friends, I am quite sure there are loads of people in Mexico and Central America who still are telling their side of the same story. Once, a number of years ago, this fellow from the United States showed up claiming to be looking for snakes and toads. And it turns out he wasn’t lying! While my storyline about being a schoolteacher visiting from the United States seems to satisfy some people, most just don’t grasp why I would put so much effort into chasing down weird or scary animals that are best avoided. Field encounters in the United States really aren’t all that different. I realize that language and cultural barriers are not the issue. Most people just fail to understand why I do what I do. I’ll admit that sometimes, in fits of frustration or discomfort in the field, I catch myself wondering why I am doing this.

My answer to myself is that I do this because these creatures fascinate me. I have gone for decades now obsessively wondering what might be under the next rock. But try as I might, I often fail to get that point across in any language. I don’t think even my parents ever really understood this either, but they were relieved that I managed to get a paycheck out of being weird.