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Ditmars hits the airwaves!

26/2/2015

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’.

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)

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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The Demon of the Orient

5/2/2015

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Allen 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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Ditmars hits the airwaves!

Snakes as pets

Snake-hunting the swamps of South Carolina!

The Demon of the Orient

Dan Eatherley

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