Let’s see how many people incapable of spelling ‘plane’ arrive here by the way of Google. But I am talking about a real ‘plain’ – a big one, in China, and about some very real live snakes as well!
A good friend (and ex-neighbor) of mine, Kevin Messenger, is in China right now, surveying herpetofauna (that is – reptiles and amphibians, for the non-biologists here) in a remote area of central China, rarely visited by Weesterners, and never before surveyed by scientists.
He is one of those natural-born herpetologists – he lives, breathes and dreams snakes. When I lived in Raleigh I would often see him pull up with his truck next door. He would holler “Hey, Bora! Come see what I got today!”. I’d walk over there and watch the bags in his truck wriggle. He would open one bag at a time, with a gleam in his eyes, showing me “the biggest rattler I ever caught!” and “hey, this one is so rare around here” and “isn’t this one pretty?” His house was full of animals, mostly herps (his veterinarian sister has her own menagerie – but her animals mostly had eyelids), and he always had great stories to tell from his surveys in the Sandhills.
He gave a talk about his research at the meeting of the Society for Herpetology when he was still in high school! He published his first paper when he was a freshman. I will, at some point in the future, write about his excellent paper on the effects of moonlight on snake activity in the Sandhills. The research in China is going to be his MS work, although he just graduated college and has yet to start grad school. Still, since the first day at NCSU he knew he was going to do graduate work with Hal Heathwole, and Hal knew it, too.
As he is sleeping in a tent somewhere in China right now, you can imagine how hard it is for him to get online. He was thinking about recording his trip and his work on a blog, but had to give that idea up – it is just impossible in his situation. Still, every now and then he goes to visit the civilization and manages to send an e-mail or two. He asked me to post his essays here, on my blog. Once he comes back home in Fall, he may republish them elsewhere on the Web, either on a static page, or on a blog that he may wish to continue to write afterwards.
Kevin has sent me a few installments already – they ar fascinating, believe me – which I will post over the next several days. He even managed to send me some pictures of the animals he saw there and I will post those as well. As the new stories and pics come in, I will post them here as well.
Today, I will start with Kevin’s introductory autobiography and description of his researh – under the fold:
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