With the recent passing of my mother, I have had time to reflect upon the amazing calmness and patience she showed as a mother for small boys. I loved the outdoors as a child, particularly catching insects and butterflies with nets, so much so that my nickname in elementary school was “butterfly boy.” While the other children were playing together at recess, I had my net and was catching butterflies, and then categorizing them scientifically.
With the recent passing of my mother, I have had time to reflect upon the amazing calmness and patience she showed as a mother for small boys. I loved the outdoors as a child, particularly catching insects and butterflies with nets, so much so that my nickname in elementary school was “butterfly boy.” While the other children were playing together at recess, I had my net and was catching butterflies, and then categorizing them scientifically.
While on one of my solo outdoor adventures in the 4th grade, I captured a large praying mantis egg sac and placed it in a jar in my bedroom. I had captured this during the fall and it sat untouched in my bedroom for several months. My mother, of course, had no idea what this structure was. It was attached to a stick that measured several inches in diameter.
One day while I was off at elementary school, she came in to clean the bedroom and encountered a buzzing mass of approximately 400 baby praying mantises that had just hatched and were flying around the room. A normal housewife would have probably called every pest exterminator in town. However disturbed my mother was by the infestation in the bedroom, she never let on. She immediately made an emergency call to Towson Elementary School requesting their son return home immediately to take care of the “insect infestation in his bedroom that he created.” I spent the better part of 2 days trying to catch every single praying mantis loose in the bedroom and then releasing them alive outside. Of course, it was impossible to catch all of them, as months later I remember eating dinner and several mid-sized praying mantises whizzed by the dining room. My mother never did raise her voice or express the fear that this incident had generated. As I got older, I graduated from insects to small mammals and snakes.
One Sunday morning, I was out in my yard again with my net and I noticed my cat was pouncing on a small mammal. Excited, I ran over and trapped the mammal with my net. It was a shrew, the smallest land mammal in North America. As a 9-year-old, I could think of no greater find. I was so excited with my catch that I put the shrew in a jar and ran up to my parents bedroom, where they were still sleeping, and stuck the live shrew in a jar into my mother’s face and she woke up. My mother, of course, had learned to remain calm no matter what her son showed her, realizing it was important to not show fear. She did not bat an eye being woken up Sunday morning with a small rodent being stuck in her face in a jar. She continued to be supportive of my outdoor hobbies.
Later that same year, another friend of mine who subsequently became a professor of herpetology in Texas, gave me a snake in a jar. As I brought the snake into the house and examined the snake, I identified it as a poisonous copperhead. The snake was small, only about a foot long. I put the snake in the jar on the dining room table as I got up with my snake book. As my mother came in the dining room, this was a whole new level of anxiety seeing a snake in a jar on the dining room table. I informed her that the snake was in fact a poisonous copperhead. Once again, without scolding or showing fear, that she certainly must have felt, she said politely could I please remove the snake from the house and release it outside somewhere, preferably not on our property.
As I started high school, like any normal kid, I took a field biology class which had a taxidermy option. My job was to trap a starling and bring it into the high school to be stuffed. Starlings are an invasive bird species from Europe and not native to the United States and have vastly overpopulated the Baltimore region. So our field biology instructor felt this was the bird we could attempt taxidermy on. For several weeks, I had set a bird trap in the back yard with no results. However, one spring morning, I came outside and encountered a starling in my trap. I was overjoyed and excited. Once again, my mother was just getting out of bed and did not share my enthusiasm. I usually walk to school, but now I could not carry a live bird with me on my walk to school, so I needed her to give me a ride to high school. I trapped the starling in a pillowcase and got in the car with my mother for the ride to high school. As we hit heavy traffic in downtown Towson, the bird managed to escape from my pillowcase and began flying around my mother’s head while she was driving. Once again, this was the true test of her patience. The easy solution would have been to open the window and let the bird go, but she knew how important my taxidermy project was and how hard I worked to catch this starling. So she managed to pull off to the side of the road while her son lunged around the car, for grabbing the bird with his bare hands and stuffing it back in the pillowcase. After completing my taxidermy project, she allowed me to put my stuffed starling on full display on the mantle over the fireplace for a brief period of time. The State of Maryland at the time had a bounty on starlings because of their overpopulation and was supportive of them being used in school on taxidermy projects.
In middle school, I had bought an aquarium and caught several small minnows, including small catfish, from an adjacent reservoir and put them in my bedroom. Over the years, the catfish that I had caught ate all the other fish in the aquarium and soon grew to a large size, almost a foot long. I became busier and the aquarium was chronically full of algae. I found out years later that my mother was afraid of the catfish because it would slam around the tank and bang against the glass, looking for somewhat to eat. She tended to avoid that side of the room. After many years in the tank, I release the catfish in the nearby reservoir.
Later that year, my mother discovered to her horror that there was a large bat flying loose in our basement. Most people would immediately call an exterminator. My mother called the high school and told me I need to come home immediately and catch the bat. Although this time I had no involvement in how the bat got in the basement. I was glad to return home, where using a combination of nets, baseball bats, and pillows, I was able to hit the bat and drive it outside.
The amount of patience and supportive learning environment that my mother provided us boys growing up greatly contributed to my development as a naturalist scientist and physician. Her patience, despite the continuous onslaught of wildlife brought to our house, paid off in the long run. Her recent passing inspired me to write this chapter in her memory.
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