Slate Creek

So, a naturalist, a field biologist, and an ecologist walk into a bar…

When I was a boy, we lived in a small town in Kansas at a time when we could roam around the neighborhood freely (well, within some limits: my parents wanted to know generally where we were) and play outdoor games such as “kick the can” and “stickball.” Often, we would spend time on the grade school playground and if enough kids showed up, we’d play “workup.” I’m aware that such comments put me squarely into the “old geezer” category. Indeed, I have more than once resorted to kidding my own offspring, in a very geezer-like way, that “When I was a boy, we only had three TV channels! Until PBS came online that is, that is, and then we had four!” Reminiscing about such times brings back pleasant memories now. Things were simpler in many ways then, but far more difficult in others. We had daily news reports from the war in Vietnam and the number of U.S. soldiers who were killed, along with disturbing reports of riots…riots, in our country!

The term naturalist can be defined as “one who studies the of natural world,” or “a student of natural history.” Natural history, in turn, can be defined as “the study of organisms and other natural things in their environment.” The term Natural history can actually be used in several contexts, including historical studies that served as precursors to modern science; museums which contain valuable collects from nature; and modern studies including ecology and evolutionary sciences. Incidentally, the point of the old joke reference above is that it could really be about one person – there is considerable overlap between all three of those descriptors!

Slate Creek, Kansas

Anyhow, it was during my growing-up years and in this setting that I became a naturalist. I was delighted to discover that just a few blocks from our house, our street went from paved to gravel, and at that point crossed Slate Creek. My brothers and I all became fond of spending time there, especially during summer months. What’s better than wading around in a creek, getting wet and muddy, and finding all sorts of marvelous creatures? It became one of my favorite places to muck about, and I did so often, commonly by myself. Without hesitation, I would wade up and down the creek between 2^nd Street and 1^st Street. It was rarely more than knee-deep, with a slow-moving current, but the water flow was reliable and consistent, and nearly every time I was able to discover something new: a school of small catfish (Ameiurus melas, black bullhead) that I disturbed, a few of which I was able to scoop up with my handy net for closer examination; dragonflies and damselflies on their plant perches – I recall noting the differences in the way they held their wings at rest; the crawdads (or crayfish, as some call them) in shallow water scuttling about on the bottom of the creek. I spent an entire afternoon once, sitting on the bank, watching a few small bluegills (Lepomis macrochirus) swimming and darting about in a pool and grabbing the grasshoppers that I tossed in. Another afternoon of wading through murky water resulted in attracting a number of leaches which latched onto my bare legs. I was so muddy that I didn’t notice them until I got home; my mother promptly told me to wash off with the hose before coming in, and she was horrified at the discovery of these leaches still stuck to me – my poor mom, the things she put up with.

My poking about and attempts to grab crawdads led to a discovery about their behavior: poking my finger into the water directly in front of them produced a seemingly defensive reaction, which was to flip their “tail” under their body, rapidly propelling themselves backwards as a quick escape to whatever threat they perceived. I did this often, studying their reaction time, number of repeated tail flips, and distance traveled. I also discovered an easy way to collect them for examination (simply grabbing them didn’t work very well, because their reaction time was quick!). All I needed to do was to very slowly and carefully place a tin can directly behind them, then poke my finger in front of them – they would flick their tail underneath their body and scoot themselves backwards into my can. (As an aside, their “tail” is technically their abdomen, which has some flipper-like extensions off the back end called uropods and a telson, while the part of their body they flip this under is the cephalothorax – the term cephal- means “head”, while thorax means “chest.” These anatomical details are a great adaptation for moving quickly, when necessary, but I often wondered whether could see where they were going when they activated this reaction!) I’m not sure how this happened, but I apparently developed a reputation for the “go to kid” for creek critters. In fact, one fall day when we were back in school, one of the teachers from a different classroom found me and told me that she wanted to teach a unit on crawdads in her classroom. “Can you get some crawdads for me?” she asked. I had a dozen or so for her the next morning. With a few exceptions (including learning about dinosaurs), my experiences in grade school were pretty boring. Mostly, I couldn’t wait to get outside and mess around with something.

By the time I got into junior high school, still horribly bored with school, I was also most certainly “too cool” to be academically oriented. My life changed on the first day of my 10^th grade year, however. I was apprehensive about my 2^nd period class: Biology, taught by “Mr. O”, who had the reputation of being the hardest teacher in the school. On the first day of class, his exact words were, “Those of you who get A’s in here will have earned them.” I instantly accepted his challenge, and over the course of that year, I rediscovered the fascinating world of biology. And I’ve never been the same since then. I owe a lot to Mr. O. I earned my A’s in his class, and I learned a whole lot about myself and what I was capable of along the way.