Field Biologist - Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art - page 38

ings for broader analyses. Others had assumed, for example, that when many lizards
have regenerated tails, the number of individuals actually eaten also must be high, but
we demonstrated that predation by raptors, carnivores, and snakes wasn't correlated
with injuries to specimens of the same five lizard species that Henry had deposited
in M.V.Z. 18 Likewise, he'd noted that California ground squirrels, at risk of snakebite,
were more skittish than those he'd hunted as a boy in Oregon, where rattlers were ab-
sent—observations that decades later led to research showing that squirrels enhance
toxin resistance by teasing snakes into inoculating them with sublethal venom doses. 19
In 1980 Richard Seigel, Fitch's last Ph.D. student, organized a symposium and sub-
sequent volume to honor his “retirement.” Among the presentations, Henry's mamma-
logist son John dedicated his to “an excellent scientist, friend, and father for the effects
his enthusiasm, originality, and high standards have had upon family, students, and col-
leagues alike.” 20 Over the next decade Henry finished a project on slender glass lizards,
for which in thirty-five years he amassed 3,353 captures of 2,116 individuals (Ed Taylor,
his irascible older colleague and a famously skillful collector, had found only a dozen). 21
He also published on rattlesnake roundups and began writing three topics, including
one on human populations called The Last Doubling and another, for children, about
people who study snakes. The third, A Kansas Snake Community, begins, “My study of
Kansas snakes involved the monitoring of local populations over fifty consecutive sea-
sons from 1948 to 1997, with mark-and-recapture procedures.” 22
Professional colleagues bestowed more accolades after Henry retired. The university
renamed the place where he had worked for decades the Fitch Natural History Reser-
vation, agreeing that he and Virginia should stay there as long as health permitted. The
Southwestern Association of Naturalists gave him its W. Frank Blair Eminent Naturalist
Award. In 1998, the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists—which he'd
joined as a grad student, remaining loyal despite “extraordinarily high costs and the
unfortunate modern tendency to not hold meetings near campgrounds”—initiated the
Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology, and just as I was to announce the
first winner, he bounded up to the stage and took the microphone. “Having as a young
man published in Copeia, ” Henry told the audience, “this is my proudest moment as a
member.”
Physical stamina and emotional resilience are useful, even life-saving qualities for
field biologists, and Henry always had them in abundance. He had run track and played
tennis as a youth, winning the “under sixteen” tournament in Medford, and he still
jogged into his eighties. Back in Oregon he'd assembled siblings and neighborhood kids
for scrub soccer and baseball, and all his life he would relish ping-pong and basketball.
On the Reservation, after long hours of fieldwork, fierce competitions took place behind
the Fitch house on a dusty one-hoop court so bumpy that ordinary dribbling was im-
possible; on one occasion, Don Clark and I each jostled our professor so hard that he
sustained a swollen, bloody eyelid. Thirty-five years later, when Henry, Alice, and Tony
visited my Arizona rattlesnake study site, the older man traversed steep canyon slopes
with the aid of a hefty wooden staff and finished the day with an impressive appetite for
spicy Mexican food.
Two western rattlesnakes bit Henry during the San Joaquin work, as did several cop-
perheads in Kansas, and he caught hepatitis in Ecuador; however, his only life-threaten-
ing field accident occurred barely two months past his eighty-ninth birthday. Out late on