Another Arboreal Adventure and PSA Syndrome

Sonoma tree vole diorama, Photographer Gabriel Moulin,
courtesy California Academy of Sciences Archives. 

Fifty years ago the red tree mouse diorama at the California Academy of Sciences looked like this*. 

Periodically I would visit and stand there spellbound.  

Like the mossy gym sock exhibited in the same hall, the tree mouse diorama featured an intriguing nest with red-haired mice disporting themselves like sugar plum fairies.

I knew that some day I would find one of those nests. I was certain that I would know one when I saw it. 

Little did I know a half century stood between my youthful ambition and its realization, but faithful readers of this blog already know the codger encountered his first red tree vole a couple months ago.  

It was a fleeting engagement and not particularly satisfying.

The nest was a pathetic example of mouse work, a paltry accumulation of fir needles balanced over a recess in the trunk, and the resident's activities were usually out of the camera's view.  

I needed to find a brood nest like the one above -- an overstuffed cushion of fur needles, a spacious stage where a mother vole performs her nocturnal ritual and little voles play in the moonlight.

A week ago we resumed the search and wandered the logging roads with slack-jaws and craned necks looking like crazed birders.      

Nests we found, and some were even in climbable trees, but all were beyond reach unless you had a cherry picker or a very well-trained monkey.

They looked like tree vole nests, but only a fool
or a monkey would climb them to find out.

The afternoon was wearing on and I was ready to admit defeat when we wandered off the road into a young stand of Douglas fir, and there it was about 35 feet above us --  a messy tangle of sticks and fir needles right next to the trunk. 

Fresh clippings and resin ducts told us the nest was occupied.

It was an excellent climbing tree with whorls of reasonably stout limbs -- living limbs mind you, not the rotten ones so common on older trees. Terry fetched the ladder while I admired the tree and yammered about its suitability.

My first ascent convinced me that the climbing path needed a haircut. So dense were the springy wire-like twigs that I felt like a Lilliputian climbing a wire chimney brush.

That done, I drilled a hole in the limb and screwed in a lag bolt mount.

The camera was a HD video cam -- a DXG 567v with a small IR array home-brewed by the talented camera hacker "EgbertDavis" .

I dropped the camera stem into the mount, adjusted the camera angle, opened the back one last time, and powered it up.

Having tested the camera on wood rats last fall, I knew the infra-red illumination wouldn't bleach the subjects at close range.

Terry and I made 5 camera trap sets that day, but this was the set that haunted my reverie as I drove up the Trinity River Canyon on my way home.

Then the car radio lost its reception and disturbing thoughts started to seep in.

Had I tightened the wing nut enough to maintain the camera angle? Would the wind buffet the camera, cause false triggers, and fill the SD card with useless footage? And how long would the batteries last?

Two nights later a big storm blew in off the Pacific.

I emailed Terry: "We've been getting heavy winds and rain, and I'm a little worried about that cam in the Doug fir. Hopefully it is sitting tight".

"We had wind gusts up to 40 mph", he answered "and last night got a big hail storm which lasted about 10 minutes".

I envisioned the fir's limbs whipping furiously in the storm, and then I saw the distressing aftermath -- a heap of broken boughs and my DXG lying on the ground.

Manic expectation, doubt, worry, disillusion, chagrin, and finally the blues -- this is the emotional roller-coaster called camera trapping.

As for the haunting doubt and worry -- I guess you can call it Post-Set-Anxiety Syndrome.

+++++    +++++     +++++

*/ Of course, the wire mesh and support structure wasn't visible; the photo must have been taken when they demolished the exhibit.

A tin can romance

On a Student Section field trip around 1957 my adolescent friends and I climbed a rocky peak near Indian Wells Canyon in Kern County. It was a super cool experience. We could see for miles and miles, and we were feeling our oats. As proof of the feat I took a picture of my boot, another peak, and the wild blue yonder.

There was a small cairn on the peak where we found a note in a tin can. We could barely make out two “female names” penciled on a flattened Kodak film box, but there was an address in the town of Inyokern. Wow. They were trying to make contact on a mountain top. It was like finding a bottled message on a beach.

We were curious about these mountaineering “females”, but we were geeky and shy. We considered the “what ifs”. Then someone pointed out that since we had taken the note we had an obligation to write. We decided to go for it. If they weren’t too old, there was no telling where this could lead us.

I drafted a letter introducing the members of our group, and showed it to my climbing partners at the next Student Section meeting. We painted ourselves as adventuresome, somewhat athletic, and interesting young men. It definitely stretched the truth about our athleticism. Conveniently we also failed to divulge our ages, and of course we didn’t bother them with details about our favorite activities, like pressing plants, pinning insects, and making study skins of road killed rodents. Nothing scares off a romantic prospect faster than revealing too much too soon. (These intuitions served us well in future romances. Science nerds learned this at a young age.)

A few weeks later I received a reply and took it to the next Student Section meeting. The mountain climbers were high school girls and a year older than us. They wanted to know more about us and asked for our pictures. We felt this was going a little fast, so we ignored the request, but kept on writing.

Our pen pal kept telling us more about her girl friend’s problems, divorcing parents, smoking, wanting to drop out, dating older military guys. Clearly, she wanted to escape and grow up fast. Our pen pal was bearing witness with a kind of horrified fascination, but was powerless to help.

Her letters got longer and ours got shorter. Aside from the effects of pubescent testosterone surges, our lives were relatively simple. We were ready to bail out.

My friend Tony hadn’t climbed the mountain, but had a vicarious interest in what he called the "tin can romance". I told him that I had done my service as pen pal, and now it was his turn.

“What about it, man?” Tony reluctantly agreed to take over. I handed him the letters, but he was no one's fool. I believe he wrote once, but the tin can romance ended. Once again we were free men.

Au contraire, Neil Sadaka, breaking up wasn’t hard to do.

Student Section Reunion

Last week the redhead and I attended a reunion of folks who long ago were members of a kids' science club at the California Academy of Sciences. The name of the science club was the "Student Section", and that's what it was -- a section of San Francisco's great museum and aquarium reserved for secondary school students. It started in the early 1940s and morphed into the Junior Academy with a more structured program in the 1970s.

The Student Section was a unique educational experience. We paid a dollar a year for membership, and were entitled to Saturday field trips in the bay area, and longer camping trips to the mountains and deserts. If you want to get a flavor of what it was like, read this tribute to one of the academy's late scientists

The Academy didn't archive much material about the Student Section, and now the students are all quite mature, if you know what I mean. So we are compiling testimonies of our experiences for the academy's archives.

Here's what I wrote.

I was about 14 years old when my boyhood friend, Javier Penalosa and I mustered the nerve to walk into the Student Section. Our 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Steinberg, mother of nudribranch specialist Joan “Lefty” Steinberg, had urged us to join the Student Section as soon as we reached junior high school age. Mrs. Steinberg had a contagious interest in the natural world, and her Saturday fieldtrips to Moss Beach at low tide were high adventure. She sent us home with crazy parental-guidance-projects, like boiling and toasting acorns to make acorn mush just like Costanoan Indians.

Until that fateful day, however, Javier and I made almost weekly pilgrimages to the Academy, usually on Saturdays. When the weather was good we walked about 40 city blocks through the park; otherwise we took the #5 Fulton Street bus to 8th avenue.

We were in our element wandering through the academy and copying exhibit signs into our notebooks. The North American Hall was the biggest draw. The dioramas were captivating reminders that wildlife was so near and yet beyond our reach.

We also longed to see the academy behind the scenes. There was only one good excuse -- to deliver a pet snake or lizard for “professional sexing”. San Francisco’s vacant lots and “lands end” had an almost endless supply of garter snakes and alligator lizards, but boy and girl naturalists had no way of knowing their pets’ sex.

We made our sexing requests known to the lady at the information desk, who dutifully called Mr. Slevin on the academy phone. Slevin was the curator of amphibians and reptiles and a veteran of the academy’s famous Galapagos tortoise collecting expedition. Though getting on in years, he was indulgent with small boys. Wearing a green visor, he peered through a magnifying glass at the reptilian cloaca, and then pronounced the sex. Oh yes, he also asked us where we got the creatures. That was it. We thanked him, gawked at the specimen bottles on our way out, and considered it a thrilling experience.

Thus my classmate George Green learned that his pet, a San Francisco garter snake named El Capitan was a male. Tragically, El Capitan was guillotined when the vertically sliding glass door of his cage slipped. But this was another excuse to meet the academy’s staff. We sought advice from the academy’s taxidermist, Mr. Frank Tose, who suggested we make a plaster cast. The two halves of the mold failed to separate. El Capitan was hermetically sealed in a block of plaster. It was not the memento mori we were seeking.

On one of our last visits the old curator apparently decided to take a quick power snooze after we had received permission to proceed to his office. We found him in his rattan recliner with open mouth and hands folded over his chest. Our exit was hasty but quiet.

Then came the Student Section years -- a brief, formative, and unforgettable interlude. Field trips to Californian landscapes became a reality. We met other kids with similar interests. An unidentified specimen was a passport to meet the scientific staff and visit the collection. No longer were we just kids off the street.

I dabbled in entomology and botany, but homeotherms were my true love. I became a regular in the Department of Birds and Mammals. The late Robert T. Orr loaned me Museum Special snap traps, and Mrs Schonewald, his assistant instructed me in keeping field notes and a specimen catalogue. Collecting and preparing specimens became an obsession.
My grandparents had a cottage in the Santa Cruz mountains. When I “got wheels” I ran a “mouse trap line” there all summer and plied Route 9 looking for road kill. When the skinning load was too much to handle, I taught some of the local kids how to prepare study skins. We spent the afternoon at the swimming hole, and set traps after dinner.

At the end of summer I delivered a large box of specimens to the academy. Dr. Orr particularly appreciated the kangaroo rats and shrew moles. A mule skull with canine teeth was also a welcome addition – at the time there was only a female skull in the collection. I beamed.

Perhaps as a result, Orr entrusted me with bat bands from the US Fish & Wildlife Service. Dave Rentz, Ed Kirschbaum and I spent many a happy Saturday night netting and banding bats in the hay paddock of Fleischhaker zoo’s elephant house. Kirschbaum introduced us to quinine water, the man’s drink.

I visited the academy almost every Friday afternoon during my high school and college years at SF State. Dr. Orr chatted with me cordially and the conversation always ended with the same question: “Well Chris, what specimens are you looking at today? To my answer he would reply: “All right, be sure to close the cases when you are finished.” Mrs. Schonewald, his assistant became a kind of mother and confidante away from home. I followed her about as she did her work, and often met Ray Bandar there, who would check in to examine the state of various macerating skulls. It was a lovely community.

The inevitable upshot of all this was that I decided to be biologist. After getting a bachelors degree in biology at SF State College and two summer expeditions to Mt Orizaba, Mexico, I got married and took a masters degree. Then we traveled east to the University of Maryland for the Ph. D. By then live mammals interested me more than taxonomy, and I did my thesis on comparative ethology of a group of small carnivores. In 1972 I headed to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo for my first job. Two and half years later we moved to the National Zoo’s Conservation & Research Center, in Front Royal, Virginia, where I worked with staff for the next three decades. We developed programs in captive breeding of endangered species, ecological field studies and reproductive physiology, and trained wildlife biology to developing country nationals.

In retirement I entered my second childhood. I am again a boy naturalist, just an old one.

Remembering a mentor of years past -- C. Don MacNeill

Tom’s Place Campground, Owens Valley, California--August 1959

We pulled off of Route 395 and negotiated the dusty potholes to our campsite. It was dark, and our mentors, MacNeill and Lundgren, were silhouettes in the light of a Coleman lamp. We unloaded our gear and joined them.

"Well, did you get anything, or was it a wild goose chase?" MacNeill smiled.

"We didn’t do too badly", replied my friend Dave as he handed him a cyanide jar full of dead katydids.

Don slowly turned the jar and assessed the catch, as Dave not only named most of the species, but recalled their host plants and details about their songs. (Dave and I had often debated the relative difficulty of collecting katydids to trapping rodents. Though I wouldn’t admit it, finding serenading insects at night in the sagebrush was a lot harder than trapping mice.)

My own report was less learned, but equally enthusiastic. That night we saw so many kangaroo rats and pocket mice crossing the roads, I was sure that the mouse traps known as "museum specials" would be full in the morning.

"I’m going to be mighty busy tomorrow putting up specimens", I crooned.

Our mentors smiled. "Well, why don’t you have a look at what we found here in camp", said Mr. Lundgren. The Coleman lantern and the bedsheet had reaped a great collection of moths, beetles, flies and other goodies. The message was clear: you don’t have to drive all over the valley to find good specimens.

A middle-aged man with flashlight approached us from the next campsite. "Boys, I gather that you’re naturalists."

MacNeill and Lundgren remained silent, and Dave resumed his discourse about our collecting activities.

"You didn’t by any chance lose some rattlesnakes, did you?"

Dave looked to me, the snake chaser.

"I don’t think so…", I hesitated. Then I registered the paternal forbearance of the three men. …. "but maybe I should check."

I bee-lined to the minnow can. Had the rattlers pushed open the lid? Or had I somehow failed to latch it after admiring the five beauties that afternoon? When I reached the can, it was empty and the lid was unlatched.

"Damn, they’re gone!" I exclaimed with an appropriate measure of drama.

"Well", said the stranger, "I think you might want to come over to my camp and collect them again." It was clear that he had been tip-toeing around rattlesnakes all afternoon, and had already discussed his concern with MacNeill and Lundgren.

Dave and I fetched the flashlights and snake stick, and as we pussy-footed to his campsite, yesterday’s memory flashed back to me…

"What the hell is that?" asked Mr. Lundgren as he released the hand brake. The minnow can was a splendid resonating chamber, and the bump of the hand brake set off the rattlers that were inside.

"Oh, just the rattlesnakes", I replied as if everyone kept a can of snakes next to he stick-shift.

"Well get ‘em the hell out of here. I’m not driving with a bucket of rattlesnakes next to my foot." The logic of keeping those lovely rattlers in the safety of the cab had somehow escaped Mr. Lundgren.

We searched the brush around our neighbor’s camp in quiet embarrassment, but a half hour later we had four of the five rattlesnakes back in the minnow can.

"Let’s hope the other one is gone forever", reflected our neighbor with a stern eye, "but maybe you should have another look in the morning." We never did figure out why our neighbor’s campsite had proved so attractive to those snakes. But we were lucky to be in the company of men who, when compared to our parents had the patience of Job. But then our parents weren’t naturalists.

That was 47 years ago. C. Don MacNeill, then a 35 year-old freethinker with a disdain for neckties, was a curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences. Milford Lundgren had been Don’s high school science teacher. Dave Rentz and I, then in our mid-teens, were members of the Academy’s Student Section, a club for "science nerds" that bore a certain resemblance to a secret society. When a San Francisco science teacher diagnosed a kid as having incurable biophilia, she would drop hints about "this special place for children like you".

On Saturdays a bevy of geeky adolescents converged from across the city at "the special place". The basement of the erstwhile Academy’s east wing housed the student section’s collections, library, meeting room, work areas, and a specimen prep area. Our guides there were a no-nonsense Stanford graduate student named Al Leviton, and a student teacher named Ray Bandar, who bore a curious resemblance to an over-developed Cosmo Kramer.

There were field trips. On Saturday mornings Bandar carted us in a WWII Dodge power wagon to various bay area destinations for "collecting".



The unofficial open-door policy between the Student Section and the science departments meant that an unusual specimen could win you an audience with a scientist. Don was certainly one of the academy’s most approachable scientists. You could count on finding him in his office or in the collection pouring over a drawer of pinned skippers.



Don MacNeill died in August 2005 at the age of 81. Two weeks later, Dave and I paid homage to our old mentor by revisiting the sites of that trip nearly 50 years ago. Fond memories of youth and discovery don’t fade easily, but they can’t be called up like the files on a computer’s hard drive. We needed to go through the experience. As we lived out the familiar old collecting ritual, the old sights and sounds summoned fragmented memories of times with our old friend. The trip accomplished what we wanted.

Memories of the First Trip
We were flattered by the invitation. True, we needed our parents’ permission, but by Dave’s reckoning MacNeill and Lundgren recognized the signs of our impending maturity. As my teenage friend put it, "They didn’t invite us to be our baby-sitters". No doubt they had weighed the pros and cons, but in reality, the invitation was simply a well-intentioned gesture. In two enthusiastic boy naturalists they probably recognized themselves.

Most importantly, the trip was a chance for Don to settle unfinished business in the Sierras. In 1959 he had discovered a new species of butterfly zipping about in the thin air of Mono Pass, and he named the skipper for his mother, Hesperia miriamae MacNeill. The scientific description of "miriamae" was unfinished, however, because he hadn’t yet seen or described the larvae. His summer trip to the high country had become an annual quest for gravid females, and a mission impossible. For several years he had returned from the mountains with females, but they had failed to lay eggs. The goal of describing the larval form eluded him for several more years. If it hadn’t been for that frustrating reality, we might not have been invited.

The timing was good. The dog days of August, 1958, were dragging on. School would start in a few weeks, and we were aching for diversion. Dave had just acquired "wheels", a hand-me down Volkswagen pickup truck from his father. Owens Valley would be the big one of the summer of ‘58, and the first of many trips we would do on our own.

It was 5:30 AM when my father dropped me off at the Rentz house in the Sunset District. Dave’s powder blue Volkswagen, symbolic of our freedom was in the garage. "Now that you have your learner’s permit", Dave said, "you can help me drive".

He went upstairs, and I loaded my gear into the truck with the energy of a sleepwalker. Then I climbed into the passenger’s seat, and stretched out for a snooze with my feet on the dashboard. Something snapped under my boot. The key! To my embarrassment I had broken it off in the ignition. A few minutes later Dave was back, and I made my feeble attempt to explain the improbable event…"You’re not going to believe this…". Dave found that he could still start the car by jamming the base of the key into the keyhole. With the confession over, my trusting friend asked me to back the car out of the garage. I was doing well until I heard a snapping sound. I had broken off the side view mirror. Thus started our trip to the eastern Sierras 47 years ago.

MacNeill and Lundgren beat us to our meeting place that day at Sonora Pass. There were delays for car repairs in Sonora, and Volkswagens were notoriously slow on grades. We found Don’s car parked on the shoulder, but the men were out of sight, so we collected on the slopes within view of the car until my friend started summoning me excitedly:

"You’ve got to see this!" I hurried down the slope and found Dave displaying his prize with wonderment. He had enthused about grylloblattids many times, and now there it was, looking like a soggy distended termite.

"That thing’s a grylloblattid? You’ve got to be kidding". It was one of those archaic missing links, a primitive Orthopteran that evolved in the shadows of glaciers. In a few years I would listen with a certain smugness as Professor Larry Swan waxed eloquent about grylloblattids, which thrive in the Aeolian zone, the high snowy reaches of mountains that the late professor discovered in the Himalaya. As Swan would have put it, the updrafts on high mountains deliver manna from the lowlands--spiders and all manner of aerial insects--to the hungry grylloblattids waiting under the snow like creatures from a Japanese sci-fi movie.

After nearly two hours of netting insects we had wandered back to the car, and were relieved to see our two friends descending the slope above us. We were together at last. Dave explained "our little accident" that caused the delay. I rolled my eyes. Don thought he might have seen a miriamae, "but it was going like a bat out of hell". In the late afternoon shadows we caravanned down the eastern slope of the Sierras towards Bridgeport. We kept a safe distance behind, because Lundgren conserved gas by coasting and riding the brake. When the road leveled out he popped the clutch and the car lurched with a smoky report.

I had never met Mr. Lundgren before. He had been Don MacNeill’s high school teacher, and he was an amateur entomologist and a knowledgable recreational naturalist who collected insects for biological supply houses. The biological supply houses sold them as "biological preparations" to schools and universities.

He was also a storyteller, as we learned that night in camp. Don had cooked his field specialty—glop. At last we learned the ingredients of his little secret. It was nothing more than tuna casserole, a mixture of tuna, noodles, peas, and mushroom soup, but he played up the glop story ("You'll find out soon enough') for suspense.

The topic of bears came up after dinner, and Lundgren issued a stern warning: never attempt to catch a bear cub in a tree. We had no idea that bear cubs were particularly dangerous, and he baited our youthful gullibility. He had committed the mistake himself somewhere in northern California in his youth. The bear had climbed as high as possible in a small ponderosa pine. He laid out his plan, which was to climb up and grab it by the scruff of its neck.

"I never got close enough for that. The bear was so terrified it starting crapping, and it didn’t finish its business till I was back on the ground. I don’t know what that cub was eating, but I assure you it didn’t smell like digested mother’s milk." He burned his clothes, and was never again interested in rescuing bear cubs. It was the kind of story that appeals to young men, especially young biologists with a weakness for scatological humor.

We left early the next day for Mono Pass, the type locality of "miriamae". We looked up to the pass from the trailhead. It was far above us, and the switchbacks looked like an unnecessary delay. Our mentors read our thoughts. "Just take your time", they advised. "We’ll collect on these switchbacks, take in the scenery, and in a few hours we’ll reach the pass."

The three entomologists took their time, but impetuosity sent me straight up the slope. When my friends’ caught up with me clouds were blowing over, the temperature was dropping, and I was still nauseous. They had a splendid collection of late summer insects. My colleagues reveled in the sights and collected more specimens as I sat glumly on a rock paying for my stupidity. It was a good lesson.

These were the fond memories that returned to us in the clear air of the eastern Sierra on our trip of 2005. We were two old guys locked in a time warp.

But one last thing. I haven't mentioned Don's theory of soul.

I was 16 when my grandfather died, and when things had settled after the funeral I stopped by the Academy to visit with Don. I didn't intend to mention my loss, but he expressed his sympathy, and I became a little emotional. He asked if I had good memories of him. Teary eyed, I answered, "Yes".

"He has a strong soul." He told me that his idea of the soul was the aggregate of good memories that one leaves behind.

Then he asked me if I wanted to drive to the Santa Cruz Mountains with him in a couple weeks to collect ferns. Of course I agreed. More good memories.

By his own definition, Don MacNeill has a very strong soul.



Note: This blog post was a joint effort with my old buddy, Dave Rentz (aka Mr Smiley to blog comment readers). Our memories of Don the mentor overlapped, but specific events differed. While I drifted away, Dave remained close to Don through the years. But when I visited Don at the academy around 2002, he asked me to send him my publications. The old mentor hadn't changed.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Library Assistant Karren Elsbernd for scanning the image of Don MacNeill, and the California Academy of Sciences for permission to reproduce it here. Photographer (c) California Academy of Sciences

References

Brown, R.M., J.M. Burns, M.M. Collins, P.A, Opler, J.A. Powell, and J. Vernon. 2006. Remembering Don MacNeill. Journal of the Lepidopterist's Society, 60(2):107-114.