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Mesmerising Birds and Snake Sandwiches (On this day in 1903)

14/1/2016

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Snake sandwiches! Bird hypnosis! What on earth was going on up at the Bronx Zoo?

On January 14, 1903, the New York Times reported on some fascinating revelations the previous night at the ninth annual meeting of the New York Zoological Society. During the event at the city's plush Waldorf-Astoria hotel, a series of illustrious people (all men of course) were elected to the board of directors were Levi P. Morton, once a Vice President of the United States, millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and Morris K. Jesup, an American banker and philanthropist and president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
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The entrance to the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, pictured in 1903
Next, the Society's vice president Henry Fairchild Osborn told his audience that during 1902, no fewer than 700,000 people visited the New York Zoological Park (today known as the Bronx Zoo) to gaze upon 503 'animals' (he meant mammals) representing 141 species, 890 birds representing 193 species and 772 reptiles, representing 114 species.
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Feeding time at the Bronx Zoo

Of course, none other than Raymond Ditmars was responsible for this remarkable collection of snakes, crocodiles, lizards and turtles. At the meeting Ditmars revealed 1902's extraordinary bill of fare for the zoo's reptiles: quantities of fruit, 2,500 live fish, 1,775 rats and an equal number of mice, 272 rabbits, 1,456 English sparrows, and 208 pigeons.
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Raymond Ditmars in his prime
The king cobra - a cannibal - was accustomed to consume two blacksnakes at a meal - the serpents were caught on the zoo's grounds - but for the last seven months the number of snakes fed to it had been diminished by stuffing a black snake with frogs. The cobra, though, reported Ditmars, was not fond of frogs but could be induced to accepting them in a "snake sandwich".
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Black snakes: a staple of the king cobra diet at the Bronx Zoo in 1902
Finally, William Beebe, curator of birds related his experience in mesmerizing birds. He claims to have "forced an idea into a bird’s consciousness while it was under the mesmeric influence." In the hypnotizing of birds he had been less successful, however, than with true mesmerism.
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Bird hypnosis?
Read more extraordinary tales from the remarkable career of Raymond Ditmars in Bushmaster: Raymond Ditmars and the Hunt for the World's Largest Viper
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The snake hunter’s curse?

5/11/2015

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Did Raymond Ditmars’s name on the passenger list spell doom for the vessels he sailed aboard during the early and mid twentieth century?
 
Shipping is integral to the Bushmaster story. It was thanks to the fruit boats steaming up from the tropics to unload their cargo at the many piers of late nineteenth century New York, that the young Raymond Ditmars got up close and personal with exotic South American specimens for the first time. These ‘very pretty tropical reptiles’ as he described the stowaways, included boa constrictors, palm vipers and cat-eyed snakes.
And it was thanks to the British steamship SS Irrawaddy of the Trinidad Shipping and Trading Company, that, in the mid 1890s, the teenage Ditmars first took delivery of a live bushmaster. A serpent which, if legend is to be believed, promptly chased him around his attic room. His parents, sitting two stories downstairs in the large brownstone house on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, were oblivious.
At about the same time, Ditmars and the government entomologist John Smith of Rutgers College, travelled down the coast from New York to Jacksonville via Charleston, South Carolina, aboard a Clyde Line ship called Arapahoe. Their mission was to collect insects in the Florida swamps. This, the first of Ditmars’s many ocean voyages, was a thrill.

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Arapahoe, Clyde Line. Coastal steamer. Stranded August 11, 1909.
And of course, during his 40 plus years tenure as a curator at the Bronx Zoo, Ditmars would make many a visit to the New York docks to welcome new shipments.
 
But did Ditmars unwittingly bestow a curse upon the vessels that brought him such zoological treasures?
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A typically busy scene down at the New York Docks in 1894.
Let’s take the Irawaddy for starters. It’s not clear exactly when R.R. Mole of Port of Spain dispatched to the teenage Ditmars the famous bushmaster (and other snakes), but it must have been sometime in the mid 1890s. And lo and behold, on November 9, 1895, the vessel, during a voyage from Trinidad to New York, with cargo, stranded on the coast of New Jersey through the negligent navigation of her master. According to U.S. Supreme Court report, the vessel was eventually relieved from the strand 11 days later ‘as the result of sacrifices by jettison of a portion of her cargo, of sacrifices and losses voluntarily made or incurred by the shipowners through the master, and through the services of salvors.’ 
Then, on 11 August 1909, the Arapahoe, mentioned above, broke a shaft and began drifting off the North Carolina coast. Help was summoned via an SOS call, which incidentally, is thought to be pretty much the first time a ship made an SOS call, three years before the Titanic sinking.
To Ditmars’s credit he didn’t seem to have anything to do with that particular disaster. But at least two further boats, aboard which the snakeman made collecting expeditions, came a cropper during the wars of the twentieth century.
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SS Minnetonka, Atlantic Line, Maiden voyage May 17, 1902 - torpedoed January 30, 1918.
The first unfortunate vessel was the Atlantic Transport liner the Minnetonka which Ditmars boarded for Europe on 8 May 1909 taking around 250 specimens of  ‘rattlesnakes, copperheads, moccains and other venomous reptiles’  to ‘zoological gardens in London, Paris, and Berlin’  to trade for new ‘specimens for the snake house in the Bronx.’ During the early months of World War One, the Minnetonka made her final trans-Atlantic voyage, becoming in 1915 a military transport. In the ensuing three years she had several close shaves with with German U-Boats bent on her destruction. On January 30, 1918, the her luck ran out while sailing unescorted past Malta. She was sunk by two submarines with the loss of four crew.
The Ditmars hex hit again several decades later. This time it was the SS Nerissa which would come unstuck. This passenger and cargo carrier was a familiar vessel for Ditmars, who sailed on it several times on relaxing Caribbean collecting forays during the 1930s. Alas, the Nerissa was was torpedoed and sunk on 30 April 1941 by German U-boat U-552 following 39 wartime voyages between Canada and Britain. According to Wikipedia she was the only transport carrying Canadian troops to be lost during World War II.
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SS Nerissa, Launched March 31, 1926 - sunk April 30, 1941.
So, did the celebrated snake man have a maritime jinx? It’s a stupid theory but everyone likes pictures of old ships and I needed something to fill a blog post.

Read more amazing stories about the life of Raymond Ditmars in my book Bushmaster: Raymond Ditmars and the Hunt for the World's Largest Viper. 

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Raymond Ditmars takes delivery of probably his last shipment. Galapagos tortoises, arrive at the Bronx Zoo, New York City, late 1941.
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The fragile  monster

19/4/2015

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The bushmaster's reputation for being the world's largest viper - and thus perhaps among the most fearsome of nature's beasts - is somewhat undermined by its shocking fragility in captivity.

This was something, Bronx Zoo curator Raymond Ditmars learnt the hard way, with a succession of specimens arriving at the reptile house in the first two decades of the twentieth century only to pass away within months, even weeks, of going on exhibition.

The bushmaster is a remarkably sensitive and fragile snake, and unless caught and handled gently was liable, quite literally, to break. The preferred method for capturing venomous serpents in Ditmars’s day—noosing them at a safe distance—snapped the bushmaster’s delicate backbone like glass. Like other wild-caught snakes, bushmasters were also susceptible to parasitic infestation, often by tiny worms called pentastomids. It would take many decades more before the secrets of keeping a Lachesis muta going, if not thriving, in captivity.
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The head of a pentastomid parasite - the bushmaster's nemesis. These have been aptly described as 'more animated screw than worm'.


In April 1955 - 60 years ago this month - one more bushmaster was added to the long tragic list of zoo deaths, in this case it was the National Zoological Gardens, Washington, DC. A specimen captured six months before in Trinidad (Ditmars himself's most fruitful tropical hunting grounds during the late 1930s) died after refusing food.

"From his original girth (about the size of a man’s wrist) he shrunk gradually into a streamlined semi coma from which he was barely able to rouse himself," reported The Washington Post and Times Herald. "He simply wasted away," said Zoo Director William M. Mann (a friend and colleague of Raymond Ditmars), who had been wont to visit him almost daily in the futile hope that the snake had relented in his resolve to starve himself to death.

According to the papers, in his last days the snake "was barely able to rouse himself to take a bit of water—his sole concession to captivity. Over the weekend, however, he writhed his last."





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William Mann and Raymond Ditmars in 1932 with a blood python, at the time, a more hardier customer in captivity than the bushmaster (Image copyright Mike Dee)
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'Snakes of the World' - A brief Review (1938)

12/3/2015

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On this day in 1938, the UK's Manchester Guardian newspaper reviewed an edition of Raymond Ditmars's famous book Snakes of the World: "There are many lessons to be learned from this book, among them that a large proportion of the snakes play a useful part in the scheme of nature, that many are exceedingly beautiful, and that some make charming pets."

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Ditmars heads to Honduras!

6/3/2015

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Gladyce Ditmars, Raymond Ditmars, Clara Ditmars and friend Arthur Gillam pictured aboard the Orizaba, 6 March 1928. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
On this day in 1928, the Bronx Zoo’s famous curator Raymond Ditmars accompanied by his wife Clara, daughter Gladyce and two friends set sail from Manhattan bound for Central America aboard the Orizaba. His mission, according to the journal Science, to ‘collect poisonous snakes for the production of serum.’  
The Ditmars party would spend six weeks in Honduras – the original ‘banana republic’ - as a guest of the United Fruit Company. While in the country, the curator was pleased to see a new serpentarium at Tela up and running and ‘studied the bites, fangs and poisons of the deadliest snakes in the Americas’.

Locals were offered bounties of up to $2 for a large, living specimen of a barba amarilla - which translates as ‘yellow beard’ - the local name for lancehead pitvipers (Bothrops). Despite the reward, the serpentarium struggled to build its population of captives as snakes were frequently killed or fatally injured during capture.

Ditmars and co. were entertained and astonished by the fearless antics of Douglas March.

The Tela serpentarium’s young manager regularly descended by ladder into his serpent pit to collect venom from the dreaded barba amarilla vipers, a duty he relished. Clad in high leggings, the fearless Pennsylvanian would descend into the pits among a hundred or more venomous serpents, brazenly free handling them to extract their venom. A recent accident with a barba amarilla, leaving March partially blind until serum could be administered, failed to temper his reckless behaviour. (March’s luck would run out eleven years later when fatally bitten by a bushmaster in Panama. It was reportedly his eighteenth venomous snake bite.)
At Tela, the snakes were ‘milked’ of their venom which centrifuged to purify it by removing ‘stray gland cells and blood corpuscles’. The venom was then carefully dried out to produce ‘small amber like crystals’ which could be kept indefinitely and shipped back to the Glenolden, Pennsylvania, USA, where it was injected in horses to produce antivenin serum.
Ditmars would later write vividly of the trip in the New York Times:

Honduras is ‘an arcadia of mammals, brilliant, flashing birds and reptiles of all sorts, including the deadliest. It is impossible to sidestep a series of thrills in a country like this. They pile up and surround you. A naturalist is overwhelmed by his observations.’ 
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Rainforest canopy of the Pico Bonito National Park, Honduras
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Ditmars hits the airwaves!

26/2/2015

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By the late 1920s Raymond Ditmars was a frequent guest on that cutting edge new form of broadcast media: the radio.

Eighty-seven years ago this week, the Bronx Zoo's curator of reptiles and mammals could be listened to on WRNY's “Home Science University” hour. According to the February 26, 1928, edition of the New York Times, ‘Dr. Ditmars is an authority on reptiles and is much at home with a diamond back rattlesnake as the average radio fan is with a loudspeaker.’  

A month before, Ditmars and M. Georges Chappelle, ‘reptilian authority of Paris’ spoke at a dinner at the stately Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue, New York City. Two rattlesnakes (Peter and Albertina) were also brought along and their rattling  - as well as the speeches – were broadcast on the WABC radio station.  According to the Times, Chappelle ‘made a little talk on the value of snake skins as commercial goods’. 
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Brevoort Hotel, New York City - pictured in 1954 just before its demolition.
Seven months after Ditmars's slot on WRNY the station became one of the first to launch regularly scheduled experimental television broadcasts.
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Snakes as pets

19/2/2015

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On this day in 1899, Raymond Ditmars - then a reporter for the New York Times - published an article about his fellow snake-collectors.

Artist Charles H. Higby kept an eight-foot albino boa named Yao, a king snake, and a slim black racer among ‘the Oriental furnishings of his studio, on Fourteenth Street’ as inspiration for his ‘peculiar work, elaborate in decorative effect … seen on many of the theatre programme heads of this city’ .

Meanwhile, Frank Speck, Jr., of Hackensack, New Jersey, possessed ‘a complete collection of the reptiles of the State’ including ‘two lively black racers, which constantly dance up and down the glass front of their cage to the consternation of nervous callers’. 

Ditmars reserved his greatest admiration for Professor George R. O’Reilly, ‘among the most enthusiastic collectors of ophidians’.

O’Reilly has 'been in nearly every temperate and tropical country in the world in his search and study of serpent life.  Prof. O’Reilly’s experiences range from the ludicrous to the other extreme. In Africa he was worshipped by the natives, and in the West Indies was regarded as a raving maniac.'

'His collection, to the uninitiated, is positively alarming; and wherever he takes up his abode the entire neighborhood becomes immediately uncomfortable.’  

(New York Times, February 19, 1899)
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Snake fanciers posing with a boa constrictor and pine snake, c. 1899.
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Snake-hunting the swamps of South Carolina!

12/2/2015

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Raymond Ditmars snake-hunting in the South Carolina swamps, c. 1915.
The steamy, mosquito-ridden swamps of South Carolina literally crawled with reptiles and were a favoured early haunt for Raymond Ditmars.

Packing a luggage of canvas bags, fine soft copper wire for noosing and an abundance of quinine, the snake hunters would head south to Savannah, Georgia, aboard one of many steamers then plying the eastern coast before completing the trip by wagon.

Their final destination was the Pineland Club near the tiny settlement of Robertsville in Hampton County, South Carolina. Owned by friends of the New York Zoological Society, this shooting preserve with rented cabins on the northern flood plain of the Savannah River was perfect for sorties into nearby cypress swamps, hummocks, grasslands, pine woods, and cotton fields infested with cold-blooded life.

Patrolling the swamps, causeways, or narrow deer paths on horses, mules, or a simple buckboard wagon, the famed Bronx Zoo curator and his associates would be equipped with wire nooses and, despite the stifling heat, wore “an armor of heavy brown duck, high top boots, and stout flexible gloves.” As an added precaution Ditmars always carried a revolver.

Having noosed a venomous snake such as a water moccasin (aka cottonmouth) or rattlesnake, he would manoeuvre “the puffing, thrashing, spitting reptile twixt thumb and forefinger around the neck,” dropping it into a fabric sack. The latter would be given “a quick swirl so that the fang that darts forth instantly is embedded in a thick fold of cloth.”

At a meeting of the Linnaean Society of New York City held exactly 114 years ago today in the library of the American Museum of Natural History, the curator expounded upon a recent visit. According to the Society's Proceedings: "He spoke of the different species of snakes met with, of their habits and of the various methods employed in their capture. He exhibited specimens of thirteen of the species obtained.’
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Water moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus) enjoying the last rays of sunshine, South Carolina (Photo © Dan Eatherley)
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The Demon of the Orient

5/2/2015

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PictureAllen S. Williams, pictured in 1883.
Ninety three years ago today, one of Raymond Ditmars's fellow snake lovers died aged 64.

Allen Samuel Williams, author, journalist, naturalist and director of the Reptile Study Society of America, was born in Ohio. As a young man he reported for the New York Times alongside a young Raymond Ditmars and later became an associate editor of the Truth and of the St. Louis Chronicle.

A famous teetotaller, Williams made a special study of opium and hashish habits, and in 1883 he self-published The Demon of the Orient, a book influencing anti-opium legislation in New York state and beyond.



Reptiles were another source of fascination for Williams who accompanied Ditmars on many snake-hunting expeditions close to New York City.  

Williams was a fervent supporter of the Bronx Zoo. In 1906, he wrote: ‘To-day all in or near New York can learn to identify snakes because they can see them alive in the Reptile House of the beautiful park in the Bronx of the New York Zoological Society, which is the greatest educator in Nature Study that our country has had or probably can ever have.’

In March 1913, Williams prefigured Ditmars's own expeditions in the 1930s by sailing for Trinidad, Tobago and Venezuela to collect reptile exhibits. By then, Williams was managing the Sportsmen’s Show held annually at Madison Square Garden, NYC, and a bushmaster was said to be on his wishlist. It is not clear whether he successfully caught a specimen of the world's largest viper.

Williams died on 5 Feb 1922 in Fordham Hospital, Bronx, NY.




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 500 snakes destroyed close to New York City (1934)

29/1/2015

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The Hudson River Valley today (©Dan Eatherley)
Eighty-one years ago today, the New York Times revealed that five hundred snakes including ‘rattlers, some of which measured twelve feet’ were destroyed by U.S. Government workers in the Hudson River Valley.  

On January 29, 1934, the Times described how described how the snakes were killed by CWA squads while ‘clearing forests and building roads … near Morristown’ and ‘at Stony Point up the Hudson.’  

In the same issue, Raymond Ditmars told the Times that the blacksnake, the rattlesnake and the water moccasin winter in the same rock ledges year after year. “The serpent clan,” said Ditmars, “is particularly tolerant or passive about the “changing of position, arrival or departure of other members.” He has seen “bevies of heads of the three “kinds peering from the crevices in the Spring”. 

Note: The CWA (Civil Works Administration) was an expensive - and hence short-lived - government initiative to create jobs during the Depression winter of 1933-4.  

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Northern black racer (Coluber constrictor) - another snake of the Hudson Valley (©Dan Eatherley)
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    Dan Eatherley

    British naturalist, writer and environmental consultant

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