MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Spring 2020

67 BIOPHILIAC words & photos :: Leslie Anthony When I think back, it’s clear I was a nature-addled kid. Most of my time was spent combing the gardens and ravines of our neighbourhood for critters, and my earliest memories are of watching ants build nests, spiders eating the ants, and birds hoovering the spiders. The web of life was my TV. Early on, I became interested in reptiles and amphibians, common where I lived and conveniently lumped under the same zoological rubric—herpetology. I was obsessed to the point of wrestling four or five books on the subject home from the library every month. As I got older, that focus waned when I discovered canoeing, girls, partying, and skiing (pretty much in that order). By high school I was reduced to indulging these interests on the side with intermittent reading, the occasional pet snake, and a fondness for National Geographic TV specials. It wasn’t until—more because of familiarity than anything else—I enrolled in a biology program at the University of Waterloo that I really dug back in, lapping up specialized courses in invertebrate and vertebrate zoology, de facto extensions of the sand-box occupations of youth. But I wasn’t quite yet a biologist reborn. Putting in time in what seemed the easiest, pre-ordained academic milieu, the only career aspiration I held was that whatever I did, the outdoors had to be involved. Maybe I’d find my way there through biology, maybe not; herpetology was a hobby but could it be a vocation? I didn’t know. But then, as many experience during similar drift, an unexpected event set my course. After my sophomore year, I landed a summer job conducting biological inventories in an Environmentally Sensitive Area of southwestern Ontario—an on-ramp back to the future. Though this first opportunity to be paid for something biological made the wages at a car wash seem attractive, it was, in other ways, a dream job. To start, along with the rest of the crew I moved into a nifty cornfield-hemmed farmhouse on the outskirts of Waterloo, hard against a frog-filled marsh and within spitting distance of lakes, streams, fields, and forest. There were four of us: three birder/ botanists from the university’s Environmental Studies program, and myself, a bona fide “zoologist” responsible for fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. Since nobody was covering invertebrates, I took these on as well, keeping an eye open for anything unusual. Our daily routine involved rising spectacularly early, bagging a lunch, then driving an hour south to what usually appeared as a green blot on one of our mud-stained topographic maps. At our destination— invariably the middle of rural nowhere—we debarked, a rolling visage of The Far Side swathed in rubber boots, nets, backpacks, binoculars, notebooks and insect repellant, the botanists also lugging wooden plant-presses while I slung an old newspaper bag filled with plastic containers for critters that required later identification. We’d split up, pick a meeting time back at the cars, and tramp off into field and forest. I would then spend an entire morning doing what I’d self-trained much of my life for: laying careful, respectful siege to nature. I turned rocks and logs, peered (and often fell) into ponds and marshes, sloshed through the muck of seeps and flooded forest; I identified frogs by their calls, egg masses, and the way they leapt into swamps and streams; I ogled distant turtles through binoculars, the shape of their shells easily betraying their species; I chased all manner of snake through high grass, rock pile, and leaf litter. FIELDWORK: THE BEST JOB EVER When a nature-addled kid becomes a nature-addled adult Alive and kicking:A whole lotta hognose snake. LESLIE ANTHONY