Chasing Skinks

Long before the puffin, there was the skink.

This lizard was my prize of prizes when I was about ten years old, living in Bexley, Ohio, a cozy village embedded within the eastern reaches of Columbus. It was the mid-1950s, a time when families let fourth-graders romp from house to house and disappear for hours in forested parks. Much of my childhood universe occupied what lay under the shaded canopy of Blacklick Woods Metropolitan Park, a twenty-minute drive through farmland from our suburban home. The park was a paradise of some of the least disturbed beech-maple forest and vernal swamps in central Ohio.

My mom, Lina, would drop me off there with a friend, Mac Albin, with nary the concern displayed by today's parents. In fact, I don't know whether to laugh or shake my head in sadness when I read today of the struggle of families to let children explore these woods. In a 2002 article, the Columbus Dispatch wrote how parents and grandparents watch their children play at Blacklick, concerned "that the girls are never completely safe. Not in today's world, where a child can be abducted from a front yard or bedroom." The article quoted Kathy Double of Reynoldsburg, a thirty-six-year-old mother who runs a childcare center for her two children and four others. She said, "When she takes the playgroup to Blacklick the rules are 'If you can't see me, I can't see you. I pick a spot in the park where I can see the whole play area. I follow that old mafia rule: Keep your back to the wall and watch for your enemies.'"

There were no walls for Mac and me as these woods became my best friend. It started in fourth grade when Steve Albin, Mac's older brother, invited Mac and me to come with him to Blacklick for the Saturday morning "Junior Explorers" program. At Blacklick, I found trees, ponds, geology, and birds so interesting that Mac and I asked our parents not to pick us up until hours after Explorers ended so we could ramble on our own. We pleaded with them to take us to the park and drop us off even when Explorers was not in session. The moist swamp forest and vernal pools made Blacklick particularly rich with reptiles and amphibians like wood frogs, spring peepers, and salamanders. Mac and I were never disappointed. Even the tiny fairy shrimp that emerged in the vernal pools after the first spring thaw were cause for getting soaked. The park naturalists were so taken with how happy we were—wet and muddy—that they invited us to help them maintain a trailside collection of native animals.

Our bonus for helping them clean the cages was the gift of snakes, turtles, and even an occasional raccoon for our own backyards. My dad, Herman, who owned a business reconditioning burlap bags for potatoes and plant nurseries, was handy making furniture, and he helped me build terrariums and showed me how to build cages. All that Mom the homemaker asked was that I keep my "zoo" in the backyard or basement. When salamanders and garter snakes got loose in the house, she acted alarmed but ended up using the incident as jolly material at her next canasta game. I began to assume that she vicariously enjoyed my menagerie.

I became especially enchanted with the five-lined skink. They were like no other lizards we encountered, elusive and confined to just a few locations in the park. They were like tiny T rexes, terrorizing beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, and spiders. The young skinks, just three to four inches long, were especially appealing for their neon-blue tails. When we found one sunning on a dead stump, we would admire it for a moment, then pounce on it for capture. But skinks have evolved an amazing method of self-preservation in a world where their predators include a long list of sharp-eyed creatures, including herons, owls, hawks, jays, snakes, skunks, raccoons, and foxes. If it grabs the skink by the tail, the predator soon finds itself holding nothing more than that wiggly tail.

Meanwhile, the skink sprints off to the nearest patch of poison ivy or other ground cover to grow another tail and live another day. The greatest disappointment was to lose the prize and be left holding this wriggling, Day-Glo tail. Outdoor ethics were unknown to me at the time, and, oddly, I don't recall the otherwise sage naturalists talking to us about wildlife conservation.

Another favorite activity for Mac and me was seining up little fish from local creeks for aquariums. Curious to see if fish could distinguish colors, I rigged a fifteen-gallon aquarium with electromagnetic feeding cups on each side of the tank. My idea was to draw the fish to the four corners of the tank in response to a bank of differently colored lights. Each color was paired with a different side of the tank. At first I paired food with light and trained the fish to visit different stations in response to the colors. After the conditioning was complete, the lights alone would send the fish to the appropriate corner of the tank. I had great plans to use the system for developing an intelligence test for fish and to begin a ranking of different species based on the time it would take them to condition to the lights. I thought the experiment was working until someone asked me, "How do you know it isn't the brightness rather than the color they're seeing?" That taught me at an early age that colorful experiments often wind up shaded in gray.

Other people asked me questions that piqued my interest in nature. On a spring day in 1954, at Montrose Elementary School in Bexley, my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Reed, spotted a bird down below our second-floor classroom window. She drew the class to the window and asked us, "Who can identify that brown bird poking at the ground?"

I ran to get the dog-eared Golden Guide to birds she kept on her shelf. When the robin-sized bird rose into the air, displaying a white rump and a flash of yellow on its underwing, it was all I needed for a correct answer. That was enough for me to thumb to the drawing of a northern (then called yellow-shafted) flicker. Hence my first success in bird identification! I begged for Golden Guides as birthday and Hanukkah presents, and many nights, my mom would come into my bedroom to make sure I was asleep only to find the light on and a Golden Guide at my pillow or dropped down on the floor under my dangling arm.

Dad acknowledged my enthrallment by bringing home box turtles he found crossing the road while visiting farmers on his bag sales trips. Dad worked long hours, brought home a briefcase of work, and returned to the office on most Saturday mornings. When he did take Saturday off, our best opportunity for...