Book Review: Bushmaster - Raymond Ditmars and the Hunt for the World's Largest Viper

"Our biggest reptile man went down to the tropics in quest of the only object that now matters, the lodestar, the summum bonum of his future existence.  Dr. Ditmars went down in quest of the deadly bushmaster... and he won't be happy till he gets one."

There are a lot of factors which may go into driving a zoo professional to obsess over a particular species.  Some of them I mentioned yesterday.  Here's another - danger.  We simultaneously have a fear and a draw towards the deadliest of animals.  Among reptile keepers, this is especially pronounced in its direction towards the venomous snakes.  At the turn on the last century, few snakes had a more fearsome reputation than a Central American giant so ominous that its very Latin name translated to "the silent fate" - the bushmaster.

Setting off on a whirlwind, decades-long quest to capture one of these giant vipers was the first curator of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo - Dr. Raymond Ditmars.  BBC nature filmmaker Dan Eatherley tells their stories in Bushmaster: Raymond Ditmars and the Hunt for the World's Largest Viper.  Eartherley stumbled across the Ditmars legend while preparing for a possible documentary on the bushmaster, which is doubly appropriate - Dr. Ditmars was not only himself consumed by his quest for the snakes, but he was also one of the leading pioneers of nature documentaries, paving the way for Gerald Durrell, David Attenborough, and Steve Irwin decades later.

The book chronicles the life of Ditmars, from a shy, awkward boy who lived for catching snakes in Central Park to the grandfather of the zoo reptile world.  As the first curator of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo, he laid the foundation for what is now one of the greatest reptile collections in the world; most of the first snakes in the Bronx Zoo's collection (as well as a long-suffering alligator) were Ditmars' donated pets.  It also tells the story of the bushmaster itself, and Eatherley hops the hemisphere to fill in the details of the snake's story, from the Bronx Zoo itself to a serpentarium in North Carolina to the forests of Trinidad, where many of the first specimens to arrive in American zoos originated.  Talking with curators, field biologists, and hobbyists, he helps us understand what it is about this snake that has made it the source of so much fascination to so many people - Ditmars not least of all.

Among Dr. Ditmars' many accomplishments, his greatest may have been the popularization of herpetology - the study of reptiles and amphibians - among the public.  He wrote many books for popular audiences, introducing his readers to the world of snakes, lizards, turtles, and crocodilians and showing them a softer side of the scaly subjects.  He certainly had a lot of material to work with - Eatherley's book is filled with quirky anecdotes from Ditmars' exploits, from sewing up a battered alligator to chasing king cobras around a warehouse to dining on endangered frogs that were supposed to be zoo animals.  He even slips in a few non-herpetological adventures, such as Ditmars' later fascination with vampire bats.

Bushmaster, like many of the zoo-focused biographies that I've shared, is the story of a young man with a passion for animals, one that his family despaired would lead to nothing but ruin.  Instead, he was able to follow that passion into a life of adventure, discovery, and wonder.  The bushmaster might have been Raymond Ditmars' "White Whale", his predominant obsession.  One single snake, however, only captures part of what he was able to achieve.  Through his adventures and his writings (and later his films), Ditmars was able to inspire generations of nature-lovers and snake-chasers in his wake.  Eatherley's book simply continues that story, passing it along for yet another generation.

Bushmaster: Raymond Ditmars and the Hunt for the World's Largest Viper at Amazon.com