EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth in an ongoing series of features highlighting authors and new books published by Torrey House Press in Utah.
“Publish or perish” is still the operating mantra for any budding scientist. From Meridian, Idaho, Dallin Kohler understood the assignment as a herpetologist seeking to establish his credibility in his chosen field. “Last year I couldn’t find a pyro for the life of me. Now I had found two, which felt like a million compared to zero,” he wrote. “Before, I had no clue if I was going to be able to get into graduate school. Now my prospects were looking good. Thanks to pyros, I had two papers, at varying stages, that would make my CV competitive.”
Those lines appear near the end of his absorbing book, PYRO: The Quest for a Beautifully Elusive Snake, which is a marvelous debut for an ambitious young author. Published by Torrey House Press, the book, spun through with endearing wit and a generous serving of Kohler’s easygoing personality, does for herpetology what ecological biologist Eli J. Knapp’s books have done for birdwatching (incidentally, whose newest title from Torrey House Press is forthcoming in July: In the Crosswinds: Birds, Humans, and the Paradox of Place).
In PYRO, Kohler nicely sets up the tension in his quest, as a student scientist, to find a species of snake that is notoriously elusive. That is, in his words, the “maddeningly beautiful species” of the Arizona mountain kingsnake (Lampropeltis pyromelana). Measuring generally between two and three feet in length, pyros are neither “particularly chunky nor skinny,” but they stand out for their “eye-catching pattern of repeating bands of three colors: midnight black, milky white and flaming red.” The snakes have been observed in Utah, as well as Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.
While those with ophidiophobia might pass on reading Kohler’s delightfully candid account of surmounting the challenges of a student scientist who has picked perhaps the most complicated subject for his herpetological research, others will find his words resonating about the obsessions and passions one develops in their chosen field. He rises successfully above the temptations to fall back into the technical nomenclature of his field. In fact, throughout the book, he sounds consistently like the guest at a party who could charm everyone with stories about his pursuit of the pyro snake, in the clearest and most accessible language possible.
When Kohler decided to write this book, he was still an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University and had yet to clinch a peer-reviewed publication hit for his CV. “The idea for it came midway through the first year of the experiences I write about in the book,” he said, adding that he had made good headway in the second year of his research which propels the story’s second half. As he explained in a phone interview with The Utah Review, “the chore of scientific writing is a necessary evil but I also wanted to do something that anyone curious enough could enjoy..” Incidentally. Kohler is pursuing his master’s degree studies in forestry at Nanjing University in China.
Making his first foray into a book-length project, Kohler was very protective at first and said little in public about his intentions. He went to the writing center at BYU a couple of times for consultation, which encouraged him to continue. “I wanted to peel back the curtains of science and share my journey to others who do not want to end up deep into the weeds of scientific jargon,” he added. He sought to strike the same accessible tone that marked successful books such as science journalist Emily Voigt’s The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish (2016). Kohler nicely emulates in his own voice the narrative arc stylings that made Voigt’s book, about the quest to locate the wild Asian arowana known as the world’s most expensive aquarium fish, engaging for readers. Other books that inspired Kohler’s narrative approach were those by David Sloan Wilson, the distinguished evolutionary biologist, and the treasure trove of nature writers highlighted in Michael Kammen’s A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004).
Take, for example, Kohler’s wonderful opening in PYRO about the 19th century “Bone Wars” pitting paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope against colleague Othniel Charles Marsh. He characterizes this epic battle of fossil science on the scales of such rivalries as the Lakers and the Celtics (Kohler is an NBA fan), the US-USSR Cold War, or, for science enthusiasts, Tesla and Edison. To herpetologists, Cope was more than a “headstrong paleontologist,” as he identified and named 385 extant living reptiles.
While Cope, in 1866, had described the pyro snake, his paper lacked any description of its diet, habitat or temperament. This sets the foundation for the challenging journey Kohler undertakes in PYRO:
[Cope] hadn’t spent any time looking for pyros in the field, otherwise the paper might have included something along the lines of: ‘despite its resplendently scintillating coloration, locating this variety of serpent appeareth to be an exceedingly arduous task.’ I say this because I wish I had known that these flamboyantly colored snakes are incredibly difficult to find before I pegged my future career prospects to them. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t aware of this paradoxical fact until it was too late.
Besides thoroughly explaining the lack of pyro sightings, especially in northern Utah, Kohler does a fine job in clearing up the confusion that many of us mix up when talking about venomous and/or poisonous snakes. This matters as pyros are neither, despite the widely spread misconception that they are one or the other. “In fact, that’s exactly what the snakes want you to think,” he writes. “It’s all part of an evolutionary deception millions of years in the making and one that is intimately intertwined with pyros.” Now, if only those with ophidiophobia could be persuaded to fully appreciate a world of snakes who fascinate with surprisingly complex and varied personalities and are actually innocuous.
In one of his most elucidating and enlightening chapters in the book, Kohler lays out the theoretical explanations of biological mimicry and the idiosyncratic ways that pyro snakes have violated such expectations. Ensuring that the reader’s eyes do not glaze over, as Kohler succinctly summarizes some 130 years of research on this specific topic, he illustrates how pending questions about evolutionary biology have yet to produce clear answers. He concludes, “Breakthroughs are great, but incremental discoveries add up over time and one day these mystifying mimics might make more sense.” That sentence makes sense in any realm of scientific investigation. Understanding the natural world is never a finite exercise, for the layperson and scientist alike.
Indeed, because Kohler is so open and gently vulnerable about his pursuit without ever sounding bitter or frustrated, the reader feels like cheering aloud once Kohler has set upon the elusive pyro, which happens in Kanosh Canyon. Late in the book, he recalls returning to the same place to replicate the achievement: “I wasn’t interested in chasing scientific significance. I just wanted to see another pyro.”
Kohler says that the project of writing this book for a broader audience has focused his observational skills as a scientist. In PYRO, he endorses the iNaturalist platform, which has become the natural science version of crowdsourcing that Pokémon enthusiasts have enjoyed. It is a remarkable resource for scientists and hobbyists.
It is easy to see why PYRO found its ideal home at Torrey House Press. Kohler’s chronicle of his journey and his encounters with pyros amplify the real value of wilderness and the potential quantifiable practical value of conservation biology, which also constitutes the heart of his graduate studies in China. Hopefully, Kohler finds time to augment his peer-reviewed contributions with another book that invites the broader community to share the enthusiasm and boundless energy that define PYRO.
