Field Biologist - Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art - page 39

the Reservation, he became confused because of diabetes-related low blood sugar and
in the gathering darkness careened off a twenty-foot-high embankment into a creek. A
branch punctured one leg, and he endured the night partially submerged in frigid wa-
ter. Meanwhile, sheriff's search dogs were hopelessly confused because Henry's scent
trail was everywhere. He was shaken but conscious the next morning when rescuers
helicoptered him from a nearby field to a Kansas City hospital, all of which he found
embarrassingly overdone.
Virginia Fitch died at home after a brief illness, in November 2002, and the family
scattered her ashes on the Reservation in a private memorial gathering. When Henry
called me a few weeks later, he spoke of missing his wife tremendously and asked for
assistance in conducting a telemetry project on timber rattlesnakes, to take his mind off
her passing. He subsequently finished several more seasons of fieldwork on local rat-
tlers and analyzed pellets to study the diet of long-eared owls. 23 Into his nineties he still
gave talks to school groups, discussing plants, bird nests, and jars of live critters that
he spread over an outdoor table. Sometimes he showed kids a big live snake too, just
like when he was a five-year-old back in Oregon.
Henry accommodated to aging by enlisting collaborators, using an off-road cart, and
reexamining decades' worth of data with new questions in mind. Alice and Tony helped
with computer-produced illustrations for his publications. He watched nature programs
and enthusiastically followed sports, especially Jayhawk basketball. In 2003 he under-
went hip replacement, optimistic that fieldwork would be easier as a result, and within
days gave his first PowerPoint presentation at a Kansas Herpetological Society meeting.
The next spring Henry returned to Oregon with Alice for a new perspective on the fam-
ily property and likely set an age record for going up in ultra-light aircraft. At that sum-
mer's A.S.I.H. meeting he spoke about timber rattlesnake research and checked in on
fellow snake biologist Rick Shine, hospitalized from a cottonmouth bite on a local field
trip. And some things never change. When predators killed our telemetered rattlers and
I offered surveillance cameras, Henry simply put wire barriers and powder track sta-
tions around the remaining snakes. Low tech, low cost all the way.
Henry was fifty-two years old when I first met the Fitches, but he looked forty, soft-
spoken yet energetic. A decade thereafter, as I began graduate school, the man was
resolutely gathering field data, making his mark on tropical herpetology while younger
ecologists were galvanized by blossoming theory. At a time when American Naturalist,
“devoted to conceptual unification of the biological sciences” according to its masthead,
was the hot journal in our mailboxes, he opted for more life history monographs. While
others lumped snake stomach contents from throughout a species' range to test for-
aging theory, he demonstrated changes in copperhead diets at one site over a period of
decades. Henry's path thus frames a riddle upon which most of us eventually reflect:
Why does one do the work, and how does it matter? By the mid-1970s I was deep in my
own Ph.D. research and keeping such questions well out of reach, but years later, while
interviewing him for this topic, I would discover that all the answers are intertwined.