Epitaph for a discarded book

Bound in orange buckram, my copy of Walter Dalquest's Mammals of Washington once belonged to the Port Angeles Public Library. 

The book went out of print in the 1950s or 60s, and the Librarian deemed it an irreplaceable reference, meaning it could no longer be checked out.

How often it was used is anyone's guess, but one reader scrawled a hand-written note to future readers, risking a fine and the librarian's scorn.

Eventually the book competed with more popular volumes for shelf space, and the librarian deaccessioned it and stamped DISCARD on the title page.

It became fair game for prowling used book dealers, and whoever bought it made a tidy profit.

You see, the codger paid $25 for this beat up copy of a discarded library book.

Some would consider it politically incorrect. It shows recently killed animals, describes trapping techniques, and lists pelt prices of bygone days.

But Mammals of Washington helped to set scientific standards for state mammal guides.

True, some scientific names have changed, and taxonomists have added several additional species of small mammals.

At least one charismatic mouse escaped treatment; the intrepid Dalquest apparently found the red tree vole too hard to find.

Mammals of Washington has detailed descriptions of geological history, climate and vegetation, life zones and ecology, and physiographic provinces, and it discusses the emigration of the state's mammal fauna from the Great Basin, the Pacific Coast and the Rocky Mountains.

Its distribution maps are based on specimen locations or verifiable records  -- the gold standard.

In 1936 Mammals of Washington was the dream of two young naturalists from the University of Washington's Zoology Department: Dalquest was a 19-year-old undergraduate, and the 30-year-old Victor Scheffer was completing his Ph. D.

They drew their inspiration from Vernon Bailey's Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon (1936),  and W. B. Davis's Recent Mammals of Idaho (1939).

A checklist of Washington's land mammals had been published in 1929, but Mammals of Washington was yet to be written.

The call of gainful employment soon lured Scheffer away from the project, but he continued to help the young Dalquest who toiled on with the dream.

In his memoir Adventures of a Zoologist, Scheffer noted that Dalquest the workhorse had "a charming disregard for tradition and rules".

He was also a multi-tasker.

He spent the next four years taking courses at the university, and in his free time collected mammals all over the state of Washington, a commendable achievement for a kid in his twenties.

More remarkable is that he also found time to court Miss Peggy Burgner.

And it never hurts to be on the good side of your girl friend's brother. Dalquest enlisted Robert Burgner to help him study shrew moles on the university campus.

Walter and Peggy married when the statewide field work was finished in 1940, but he was saddled with an overwhelming volume of data.

It was too much to turn into a thesis in a reasonable amount of time, so he whipped out his masters thesis on geographic variation in snowshoe hares.

Then came December 7, 1941. Dalquest's daughter Linda writes,

"..dad went down the next day to enlist in the Navy, but during his physical exam they detected a partial hearing loss in one ear . . . the doctors discovered some plant seeds in the ear – apparently similar to what we call foxtails in Texas – which he probably acquired while camping outdoors.  Apparently they had punctured the ear drum, and he was turned down by the Navy and ended up working in the shipyards during the war. 

Mammals of Washington was published 7 years later.

It contained enough scholarship for an advanced degree, and would have been the academic swan song of many other students.

Dalquest tackled two more faunal studies of similar scope in Mexico before getting his Ph D. for Mammals of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.  

Mammals of Washington contains some amusing lessons about field work, like, never reach into a burrow for a sprung trap . . . "A female long-tailed weasel promptly fastened its teeth into my forefinger and clung on, bulldog fashion, to be lifted into the air with the attached trap swinging".

He was a pro at finding shrews and moles, fished 9 Townsend moles from the bottom of a well near an old cabin in the woods. By identifying road killed moles he discovered differences in above ground activity between species. (Coast moles don't get the "Firestone press").

He was the first to discover a nest of the mystifying American shrew mole (Neurotrichus gibsii) -- of all places in a hollow stump above ground, and he corrected the anatomist A. Brazier Howell, who claimed that shrew moles can't assume the picket-post (=bipedal) posture.

He proved it with a photograph in a separate paper devoted to the biology of the species.


Dalquest's colleagues Norman Horner and Fred Stangl noted that the old Swede had the hard driving work ethic of early American naturalists . . . "his personal vertebrate catalog number exceeded 24,000, and 50% of those were mammalian skins—a level of collecting activity rivaled by very few". 

My discarded copy of Mammals of Washington is a labor of love and remains fine fodder for mammalogists.

The loss of the Port Angeles Public Library was the gain of a grinning old camera trap codger.  

[Many thanks to Drs Linda Schultz and Frederick Stangl for information about Dalquest.]

References

Bailey, V.  1936.  Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon.  North American Fauna 51:1-416.

Dalquest, W.W. and D.R. Orcutt. 1942. The biology of the Least Shrew Mole, Neurotrichus gibbsii minor. American Midland Naturalist,  27: 387-401.

Dalquest, W.W. 1952. Mammals of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. Louisiana State University Studies, Biological Sciences Series 1:1–229.

Davis, W. B. 1939.  Recent Mammals of Idaho. Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho. 400 pp.

Horner, N. V. and  Stangl, F. B., Jr.,  2001.  Obituary. Walter Woelber Dalquest: 1917–2000.   Journal of Mammalogy, 82(2):604–612.

Scheffer, V.B. 1982. Adventures of a zoologist. Encore Editions.

Taylor, W.T. and W.T. Shaw. 1929.  Provisional list of the land mammals of the state of Washington. Occasional Papers Charles R. Conner Museum. No 2:1-32.

Ken Stager, 1915-2009

Stager during WWII. 

Photo probably taken in Myitkyina District, Upper Burma.

Kenneth E. Stager died a few weeks ago at the age of 94.

I treasure the opportunity I had to meet him.

Tracking him down wasn't easy. In retirement he was too busy to answer letters. I can't blame him.

When I wrote to him in 1998, I was intensively researching biological exploration of pre-independence Burma.

Stager had been a soldier in the China-Burma-India theater during WWII. His job was to collect birds and mammals, screen them for trombiculid mites, and prepare them as voucher specimens for the United States Typhus Commission.

What does that have to do with war?

Well, there was a race going on to crack the epidemiology of tsutsugamushi (Japanese: dangerous bug) disease, or scrub typhus.

The disease took more lives than combat, and sore-covered typhus survivors were in for a long recovery.

Solving the epidemiological riddle would give a leg up to either the Japanese or the allies.

 

Japanese regimental picture from Upper Burma, WWII. 

Photo probably taken after the British and Indian evacuation of Burma.

(Author's collection)

I knew little about the Typhus Commission back in '98, but Stager's specimens in the Smithsonian's National Museum stirred my imagination.

Each was a piece of history and part of a story that I wanted to know.

I found that Stager was living in retirement in Los Angeles, but my telephone messages were never answered.

So I wrote him a letter.

Months passed, and I had pretty much given up hope when a young colleague at the National Zoo told me Ken Stager had called about my letter.

Talk about a small world. My colleague Jesus Maldonado knew Stager very well.

The old curator apologized for failing to respond, and promised to tell me about his Burma days.

A few months later I had business in San Diego, and made an appointment to spend a day with him at the Los Angeles County Museum.

It was 1999. Stager was 83 years old and Emeritus Curator of Ornithology and Mammalogy.

Kachin regimental manao (festival) in 1950. 

Photographer unknown. (Author's collection)

We spent a great day together, and I tape recorded an oral history of his days as a soldier-mammalogist.

He had an amazing memory and clarity of diction, and listening to him was like reading a great book.

So how did his orders change from foot soldier to mammal skinner?

Here's his story.

There was a company of Kachin levies attached to the battalion in Myitkyina (pronounced Micheena) District, under the command of an Anglo-Burman named Jack Girsham.

Girsham had been raised in the jungle and grew up hunting. Before the war he had worked for the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation as a shooter of tigers and rogue elephants.

Jack Girsham, Stager's friend from Typhus Commission days. 

(Photographer unknown)

The Kachins didn’t care for k-rations, so they supplemented their table with jungle fowl and pheasants snared in the surrounding hills.

One morning Stager found them returning to camp with "a beautiful adult male silver pheasant".

He saw only one thing -- a precious zoological specimen about to be plucked.

The Kachins saw breakfast.

As any zoologist can understand, unceremoniously plucking that specimen was a disturbing thought.

Stager requested Girsham, who spoke Kachin, to negotiate a deal. The result was that Stager could skin the bird if the Kachins got the carcass.

When the Japanese started shelling he jumped into a trench with the half-skinned bird.

And when the skirmish ended he requested cotton from the medical sergeant.

"Why?" asked the sergeant.

Stager convinced him that skinning birds was a legitimate war-related cause.

Not long afterward, Colonel Thomas Mackey, head of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in N.C. arrived from the States to establish the US Typhus Commission, recently decreed by Executive Order.

Mackey summoned Stager, the word of whose strange habits had spread through the battalion.

He explained to the young soldier that he had brought a whole staff of specialists from the States, but had failed to get the mammalogist or ornithologist needed to survey bird and mammals for vectors of scrub typhus.

"I'm going to have you transferred."

Stager soon received his new orders, and made a case for having Girsham transferred too.

He and Girsham spent the rest of the war collecting mammals and birds for typhus research with a shot gun appropriated from the Chinese army. And they potted birds for mess whenever time permitted.

They made extensive collections of the fauna in the mountain rain forests north of Myitkyina using outboard motor boat and jeep transport. The unit moved to Yunnan for two months during a typhus outbreak in Kunming.

Typhus work ended several months after the Japanese surrender, and the Commission's results were published in various journals.

Most of the specimens went to the United States National Museum in Washington D.C., but some reside in the Los Angeles County Museum.

I asked Stager what became of the silver pheasant, and he said it was there in the museum.

That's when I took this picture.

Stager at the LA County Museum in 1998 holding the silver pheasant he finished skinning despite Japanese shelling.

(Photo by Chris Wemmer)

As I said, I treasure the opportunity I had to meet him.

There's a lot to learn from old guys who work in museums.

References

Audy, J.R. 1968. Red mites and typhus. University of London, The Athlone Press.
[a scholarly review of research on typhus and the accelerated investigations during WWII]

Girsham, J. with Lowell Thomas. 1971. Burma Jack. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York

[a good read, with a chapter devoted to Girsham's role in Merrill's Marauders.]

Mackie, T.T. et alia. 1946. Observations on Tsutsugamushi diesease (scrub typhus) in Assam and Burma. American Journal of Hygiene 43(3):195-218

Philip, C.B. 1948. Tsutsugamushi disease (scrub typhus) in World War II. Journal of Parasitology, 34(3):169-191.

Spy pics from the rabbit's boudoir

The "spy camera" has been creeping closer and closer to jackrabbit's boudoir. Now 30 inches away, it gawks at her like a bold Peeping Tom. I got over 250 still pictures and 66 short movies last week, and she could care less. But I can only expect to find her in this boudoir every second or third day. Obviously she has several.

Here's what I learned. She arrives at her boudoir shortly after 6:00AM, but she doesn’t settle down right away. First she sits attentively with rabbit ears alert. Next, she cleans her hind feet as if they were $250 running shoes. This makes perfect sense, since hers have to last a lifetime, which in her case that would be another 3 years max. Then she washes her face, cleans her forefeet, and licks her breast, sides, and lower back.




She's a very clean animal, except for the business of eating the feces.

When that is about to happen, she gets a certain look, "Oh oh, . . . something's coming!" Then she bends to one side with the flexibility of a contortionist and receives the pasty contents of the caecum, which is a large appendix to the intestine. (View the following 4 photos as a clockwise sequence--they took place in 32 seconds).



If I am reading the photos correctly, the caecum evacuates its contents about every half hour or so, because that's how often she goes through the manuever.

Soft feces isn't the finished fecal product, but it isn't partially digested vegetation either. They reportedly have a protein content of 36% and a water content of 80%. Pelleted feces have 14% protein and 74% water. In rabbits, coprophagy seems to be a way of recycling protein that fails to be absorbed on the first passage through the intestine. In other words, it's a way of extracting maximum protein from food. Thus, rabbits were among the earliest recyclers.

I think it's time to end this post. I am hearing "Something's coming" from West Side Story, and I'm feeling poetic....

"Something's coming, something good,
proteinaceous caecal food, its time to eaaaaattttt!

Enough!

References

Best, T. 1996. Lepus californicus. Mammalian Species, No. 530:1-10.
Lechleitner, R.R. 1957. Reingestion in the black-tailed jackrabbit. Journal of Mammalogy, 38:481-485.

Camera trap pioneers: O.P.Pearson

Game trails have always interested naturalists, because they tell us where wild animals move and how they use their habitat. Trails come in all sizes, are usually "engineered" for energetic economy, and are most pronounced where activity is concentrated--near feeding areas, water, or mineral licks. Climb a tree or hide near a game trail, and sooner or later you will see who uses it.

In the 1950s, Dr. Oliver Pearson of the University of California embarked on a traffic survey of mouse runways on his property in Orinda, California. Professor Pearson was a distinguished and particularly inventive scientist who studied mammals and birds. His interests ranged from taxonomy to physiological ecology and predation. He was also a pioneer in the use of camera traps.

Pearson wanted to know what goes on in the microcosm of mouse runways. To a mouse, a patch of weeds or a grassy field is like a jungle, and species like meadow mice bushwhack and maintain their own runways with their teeth. In a clear runway they can zip along at a brisk clip and tend to their daily business. Harvest mice enjoy the labors of their larger neighbors.

Pearson's property harbored populations of meadow voles and harvest mice only 50 feet from the house, and the epicenter of his study was a 20 x 20' weed patch with a brush pile in the middle. Could a professor of mammalogy ask for anything more?

He used two 16mm movie cameras in tandem with weather stations to survey the traffic. The camera shutter was electrically activated whenever a mouse or even a large insect passed the camera lens. He used two trigger mechanisms with equal success, a treadle and a photoelectric cell.

The cameras were synchronized with electronic flash units. Nowadays we can snoop on sensitive species using infra-red cameras. To avoid frightening the mice, Pearson masked the flash with 18 layers of red cellophane, and noted that "a muffled clunk made by the mechanism seemed not to alarm the mice unduly."

Powered with alternating current, the cameras ran day and night, but there was a problem with differential exposure. Daytime pictures were overexposed, because the shutter was slower than 1/30th of a second and the f-stop was adjusted for night. Again the solution was red cellophane, this time over the camera's lens. The camera units were sheltered in glass-fronted housings. Overhanging eaves and a blackened light bulb counteracted the effects of rain and dew.

Pearson positioned a camera unit on one side of a mouse runway. On the other side, and framed within the camera's view, were the instruments of a miniature weather station: a dial thermometer, a hygrometer, a ruler, and an electric clock with a sweep second hand. Thus, whenever a creature took its own portrait it also recorded its body length, the time, and a weather report. Since he live-trapped the mice and gave them distinctive "haircuts" he could identify many of them individually.

Not long after he deployed the equipment, the neighbor's Siamese cat discovered that the camera housings were superb perches for mousing. He solved the problem by fencing the weed patch. Then a slender salamander electrocuted itself while short-circuiting the treadle. Delusional song sparrows were another problem. They wasted a lot of film shadow boxing their own reflections on the weather station window. Curiously, one bird side-stepped an oncoming meadow mouse, a gesture of road etiquette rarely seen on California highways.

In nineteen months of operation (111 recorder weeks) the camera traps generated 8,495 photographs. In other words, weed-patch wildlife made an average of 11 passages per day. The professor noted that, "A patient, non-selective predator waiting for a single catch at runways such as these could expect, theoretically, a reward each 2.2 hours." The cameras mined enough information for three scholarly articles.

Pearson's first paper on the traffic survey contains the information of most interest to camera trappers. I'll go out on a limb here, and state my belief that the results also apply to larger mammals, especially other herbivores like deer.

His "pleasant surprise" was that 26 species of animals, from weasels to snakes and mole crickets--made use of the runways. He never saw three of these species within at least a mile of the study area, proving that camera traps often disclose nature's little secrets. Ironically, he never photographed three other species he commonly saw within 100 feet of the recorders! The take home message here is that placement of camera traps is critical.

Though two species of mice used the runways, Pearson's camera traps revealed that meadow mice were the "public works custodians". When meadow mice stopped using a runway, weeds and seedlings quickly filled them in. Another curious finding was that mice apparently used runways selectively even though nearby runways seemed equally suitable.

Pearson's camera trap studies of rodent ecology are still among the most elegant and detailed studies of their kind. The work also seemed to stimulate Pearson's interest in predator-prey relations, for he went on to study predation of mice in Tilden Park not far from the UC campus. During the next twenty years a smattering of biologists, including your's truly used homemade camera traps for wildlife studies and surveys. Then in the 1980s camera traps became commercially available, and wildlife biologists developed camera-trap-fever.

Often we don't discover common interests till it's too late. This camera trap codger wishes he had mustered the courage earlier in his career to ask Pearson about his camera trapping days. Many times I saw the professor at meetings of the American Society of Mammalogists, but stood speechless and in awe. I guess we are a lot like meadow mice, politely passing each other through the runway of life. Mice and men are alike that way.

Acknowledgement: My appreciation to the Allen Press for permission to reproduce the plate from Pearson's 1959 paper, and to Kathleen Berge of the California Academy of Sciences for scanning it.

References
Osterberg, D.M. 1962. Activity of small mammals as recorded by a photographic device. Journal of Mammalogy, 43:219-229.

Pearson, O.P. 1959. A traffic survey of Microtus-Reithrodontomys runways. Journal of Mammalogy., 40:169-180.

Pearson, O.P. 1960. Habits of Microtus californicus revealed by automatic photograph records. Ecological Monographs, 30:231-249.

Pearson, O.P. 1960. Habits of harvest mice revealed by automatic photographic recorders. Journal of Mammalogy, 41(1):58-74.