A Very Special - 80 Year Old - Observation

I'm making this story my first actual Journal entry, because of the unique and important reasons for my submitting, as an iNaturalist observation, a story I uncovered recording family history from my 99 year old mother.

I don't submit other people's photographs as a rule, but, to me this is a special exception that I make for reasons that are important to me personally, but also to preserve some rare data points with surprisingly remarkable precision. While what follows is not my own story as such, I feel it is nonetheless uniquely mine to record and report. It has value as biological wildlife data, but also, strongly a local historical interest that justifies its preservation on multiple platforms, I believe.

I'm sure I will write some more conventional Journal posts soon, but feel a need to break the ice, so to speak, with this one, so that the story behind this observation might reach a larger readership than when simply buried among my other "normal" submissions.

So, here is what I have to accompany some 80 year old photographs that I found in an old box upstairs, just as I presented them as my 501st iNat' observation, on 26 March, 2023. I openly include deceased family members' names for their historical value - many, many people outside the family in south Florida knew and fondly remember them I am finding out, and they are now a part of our larger community history...

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/152466688

For my 501st iNaturalist observation, I want to do something very special, if unusual, to honour my mother, who at 99 years old, has been an inspiring lifelong amateur naturalist and photographer. This is also in honour of her younger brother, who has just passed away at the age of 96. I will submit a valid (accurate place and time) observation on her behalf, with her own photographs, and her sister's written description, of a uniquely documented encounter with a specimen of Florida wildlife nearly 80 years ago, when she was 19 years old.

For the historical record and context, my mother, then Theoma Brocious, having moved with the family as a toddler to Florida in 1925, followed in her own mother's footsteps as a photographer, and began documenting wildlife in Florida when she bought her own first 35mm camera while in High School in Fort Myers. Her oldest sister, Thelma, had by then married Frank Heath, a high school teacher. Thelma & Frank moved to the fishing Town of Everglades, Colier County, Fla., three days after the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that destroyed the overseas railroad to Key West. They were then transferred to Marco Island (then accessible only by ferry or freight train) where Thelma also became certified as a school teacher. They both taught on Marco for thirteen years beginning in 1936, living with the few other teachers at "Uncle" Jim & "Aunt" Jonnie Barfields' seven bedroom home and boardinghouse at Caxambas, at the southern end of the island. The newly built four room combined school on Marco at that time employed four Teachers to educate around 80 students in the 12 grades. Frank started off handling all of grades 7 through 12 in his room upstairs. Naples was then "a small village at that time and just a bend in the trail," and there was only one Medical Doctor in the County, over in Everglades.

So, my mother Theoma made photographs, and kept handwritten indexes with Dates and brief descriptions. Thelma would later write an extensive memoir that includes a lot of great stories and now historically valuable data.

This observation combines the two - the photographs (scanned from the original 35mm negatives) and specific dates from Theoma's records ("July, 1943" on "Finopan" film) - with Thelma's vivid recollections written later. Note, Thelma's written narrative is very precise as to this observation's exact location (details clarified and corroborated by other portions of her writings as well).

Here then, with no apologies, is a slice of life (wildlife), from the olden days of Florida in 1943:

"One spring [sic] in the early '40s Frank [Thelma's husband Frank Heath] went to a state meeting somewhere upstate, I was to go to Ft. Myers and pick him up on the week end. Odessa Levins, Donald Wine, Frankie [son] and I drove up together. When we got almost to the railroad crossing (which later was the new road bed into Marco), I saw a rattlesnake lying just at the edge of the pavement. I ran over it with one wheel and stopped. It didn't seem to have hurt her and she crawled down to the edge of the canal. She seemed quite sluggish as she had just recently eaten. Frankie and Donald went up to a bridge about 150 feet away that had been recently repaired and found a piece of a six foot long piece of 2 x 4. They brought it back. I took it and hit the snake on the head a couple times. She seemed dead so I dragged her to the edge of the pavement, A Tamiami freight semi came along and the driver stopped. He got out and walked back, keeping about ten feet away from the snake. He asked me if I knew what I was fooling with. I told him I did and was not taking any chances with it. We let it lay there and it didn't move so I decided to take it along. We had a burlap bag in the trunk of the car and we put it in that. I tied it shut and we went on our way.

When we got to Dad and Mother's, Burnell [younger brother Burnell Brocious] took it out of the car and dumped it into a deep pail. It was dead. Burnell coiled it up in a box and we took it up to the Ft. Myers News Press - where Dad [Robert Calvin Brocious] was a linotype operator. We had some fun with the men there. The next morning I took it to Ike Shaw who was a taxidermist. He said it was a female as the markings were hearts instead of diamonds and it was the prettiest one he had ever seen. She had eaten a half grown rabbit. He cured the skin and mounted it on green felt for a wall hanging. It was 5' 11" long and had 11 rattles – no button. I had knocked just a couple of the scales off the top of her head. My big game hunting in the Everglades."

[excerpted from:]
Journeythrulife
Written For My Family
1997
By
Thelma B. Heath

• In the photographs, Thelma is holding up the big Rattler, and their father is displaying the mounted skin.
• Is there any truth in the Taxidermist's claim that one can sex an Eastern Diamondback by the shape of their diamonds/hearts?
• While the photographs obviously show only what seems the end of the story, and are of course verifiable evidence of the species involved, the observation is, in effect, of the live snake, as it was first encountered - 150 feet from that bridge, just before that railroad crossing / roadbed (both of which are actually still identifiable in a much changed landscape). That is not negated by the fact that that snake was then killed, then photographed. Incidentally, as the specimen's skin was preserved, it theoretically could contribute more (genetic?) data in future, if its whereabouts in some family collection (or highschool biology classroom, more likely) could be rediscovered.

As one who knew the beloved Mrs. Heath as my fascinating Aunt Thelma, it almost goes without saying that this story is no doubt the only time she deliberately killed a wild animal in the near wilderness of Florida for a reason other than to put dinner on the table, and that even then it was done reluctantly and out of a sense of community duty that made perfect sense at the time, and not for "sport." What's more, and very characteristically, she immediately found a way to add real human value to the event by having the beautiful hide tanned so that she could use it to inspire wonder, admiration, and respect for such a snake in her hundreds of young students over her long career as a Teacher, both in Marco, and later in Naples (after 1949). Her quiet passion for all things in Nature really stood out to me, as a child, and her home was a veritable museum of seashells and artwork made from cypress knees and bracket fungi. Her students were so lucky to have learned with her over the years.

Posted on March 27, 2023 04:52 AM by william_deml