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tral American brown forest skinks contained eggs during most months, evidence of a
more extended breeding season than in ground skinks—as we expected for reptiles in
tropical regions with year-round warm temperatures. 7
Dissecting pickled lizards was tedious, and I welcomed diversions. One day Jay and
Linda assigned me to review literature on reproductive isolating mechanisms in frogs.
Sifting through decades of the ZoologicalRecord' s annual, worldwide survey of publica-
tions, I learned that countless people do herpetology. More importantly, my supervisors
introduced me to criticism unlike anything I'd experienced in high school, delivered in
red ink all over my report (“The word 'data' is always plural!”). Henry's daughter Alice,
two years younger than me and studying temperature effects on skink eggs, was also a
distraction. Once I followed her into the museum's climate chamber, came back a few
minutes later, and found my data sheet marked in Linda's elegant script: “Before you
run off with a pretty girl put the cap back on your pen!” As summer ended I got up the
nerve to invite Alice to a party—but after we'd had punch and danced a few times, Henry
retrieved her so fast that years later I teasingly asked her husband, Tony Echelle, how
they'd ever managed any privacy for courtship. “Henry,” he answered, “was in Costa
Rica that year.”
Graduate student life looked a lot more exciting than high school. Jay was gathering
material in the Kansas Flint Hills for his thesis, and once a week, before dawn and under
threat of expulsion for riding in a car, I slipped down to his apartment and hunkered
out of sight as we left town. He hoped to discover the function of the waxy “femoral
pores” on the hind legs of collared lizards by analyzing how they changed seasonally, so
each trip we collected a male, female, and juvenile for lab work. 8 I also wanted to find
venomous snakes, but because our grassland site seemed too far west for copperheads
and too far east for prairie rattlers, I wasn't optimistic. Nor, as a result, was I initially
cautious. One morning, though, I spotted an old plank that looked just right for reptiles,
turned it over, and was electrified by urgent buzzing near my fingers. I hadn't realized
the Flint Hills are prime habitat for massasaugas. Fortunately that little rattler didn't
bite me, nor, later, did two others of her species, heard rattling in the dew-soaked grass
before we saw them.
I found more venomous snakes after returning to Texas, one of which taught me a
long-lasting lesson. On one occasion along a creek near my grandparents' place I en-
countered two thick-bodied cottonmouths; as I'd seen illustrated in topics, I pressed
each one's head down with a snake hook, then held it between a thumb and two fingers.
My heart was racing, the air thick with musk from the struggling serpents, but I got
them into bags and preserved without incident. A few weeks later, though, I found
a broad-banded copperhead under a stump and took it back to my home laboratory.
Anxious to measure the snake and emboldened by having caught the cottonmouths, I
encircled its neck with left thumb and forefinger, stretched its tail toward the twenty-
four-inch mark on a yardstick—and felt a hot wasp sting-like jab. I was shocked to see
fangs spider-walking toward my right thumb, necessitating rapid maneuvers to avoid
a second bite! Fearing adverse parental reactions, and confident from reading about
Henry's untreated bite by a larger Osage copperhead in Kansas, 9 I kept the accident to
myself and suffered only nausea and mild swelling.
Among my friends in the Fort Worth Children's Museum's natural history club was
George Oliver, a couple of years younger and as obsessed with mammals as I was with
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