Unnaturalist

Jay and Ed are naturalists. When they walk down a lighted path, they reach into the lamps and pull out beasts without interrupting their conversation. Jay puts a lot of things into baggies he always has with him. Ed puts things into the right front pocket of his jacket. Me, not so much. There is a scrollwork sign over the library at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that says "Study nature, not books." As a magazine editor and textbook cobbler, my fieldwork is in the library and online. My specimens are scientific reports and conversations with scientists who tell me whose work is sound and who is walking off the dock. I'm sheepish about the sign at CSHL but luckily I don't get there that often.

Which brings us to the baboon spider.

Jay posted this picture of the baboon spider yesterday. He has more pictures on his drive that I would post now but Jay and Greg are out in the helicopter this morning investigating gold-poaching miners who are burrowing in the buffer zone where they don't belong. We made the acquaintance of the baboon spider when Jeff, our guide, teased it out of its hole with a bit of stalk. When the critter grabbed the stalk, Jeff tried to ease it out of the hole and the spider tried to ease Jeff into the hole and they ended up at a standoff with the eerie schrecklichkeiter half in half out.

My plan for this trip has been to do what Ed does when he sees a crawling thing. He picks it up and caresses it, admires its attire, maybe puts it in his pocket. So I had my chance with the baboon spider. It was offering a paw and I could have just pinched it by the paw and plucked it out. I'm told that if it completely forgets itself and chomps on me that it feels like two bee stings. Reading a first-draft manuscript feels like two bee stings so I can handle that. But I didn't pull it out. Because it was Thursday, and Thursday is the wrong day to pull monsters out of their caves.

So I'm overdue by about one career for getting into the field. Last night Ed taught us the two ways an Alabama boy catches poisonous snakes. There is a vervet monkey a few feet behind Bailey's head. We're going into the teeming rain forest on the mountain tomorrow.