Order of Canada for local snake and frog expert
A guy walked into Francis Cook’s office some years back carrying a big box. Said he had caught a live rattlesnake.
Cook, the Canadian Museum of Nature’s curator of herpetology (reptiles and amphibians), had assured the man there are no rattlers in our region, but the guy took issue with this and brought along his evidence.
The snake was very much alive, and not happy. Sure enough, the man’s box was going thumpity thump, but Cook opened it up and found only a milk snake inside.
“You get reports of rattlesnakes, particularly from the Gatineau Hills, but they’re never anything but harmless milk snakes,” he said Thursday in an interview.
Cook, 83, was admitted to the Order of Canada recently in recognition of his years of work identifying animals that many of us ignore, and for bringing along the next generation of researchers.
Snakes, frogs and other animals in his field of study are less understood than birds and mammals, says Cook. That’s why he likes them. That’s why he got into the field as a 10-year-old boy with questions about frogs back in 1945. He walked into the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and asked to see the curator of herpetology. He even knew the word at age 10.
The curator, a man named Shelley Logier, was happy to talk. (Oddly, Logier was from Ireland, a country without snakes.)
Cook was started on a career path that ultimately took him to the museum and into lifelong study that he continues to do in a scaled-back way today.
He joined the Museum of Nature in the middle and late 1950s, “and then I got hired as curator of reptiles and amphibians in 1960, as soon as I had my master’s degree. I was in charge of building the reptile and amphibian collection,” and doing research on them.
He travelled through all the provinces except Newfoundland (which has no native frogs or snakes) doing field work. It was a different time from today, when a young scientist has to complete a PhD plus years of post-doctoral work before landing a full-time job. The museum did press him to keep studying, and he got the PhD eventually.
The point of all this is to provide a “baseline,” a survey of what species live where, and how large the various populations are.
The museum notes that “during his tenure, the national herpetology collections expanded almost tenfold from about 14,000 to 133,000 specimens.”
And one day history repeated itself. A boy named Stephen Darbyshire walked into the Museum of Nature and wanted to ask some questions about herpetology. He was 10 or 12 at the time. He met Cook.
“It’s a pretty imposing building, pretty intimidating for a youngster,” Darbyshire recalled this week. “But he was just great. He put me at ease, he had time, he didn’t dismiss me. He encouraged me.”
Darbyshire does plant research for Agriculture Canada today but is still an amateur herpetologist. And Cook helped many others like him, both young professionals and amateurs.
He served as curator until the “great purge” of 1993, when the museum laid off 39 scientists without warning. Then it asked him to stay on as an honorary curator and research associate, a fancy way of saying he would keep working without pay. Cook was 58 and had a decent pension so he took the offer.
He was the editor of a science journal called the Canadian Field-Naturalist for more than 30 years.
Through all this his wife, Joyce, had built her own parallel science career. She went back to school and studied entomology at Carleton University and then became a research assistant for a Carleton biologist who studies the bugs of Central America.
Today Francis Cook is working on revisions of his book, Introduction to Canadian Amphibians and Reptiles, and on a history of the Museum of Nature.