A speech given by Peter to the New York Turtle Club on his thoughts and remininscences of John Behler.
JOHN BEHLER
Thoughts and Reminiscences by Peter C. H. Pritchard
A generation, or was it two generations ago, when we herpetologists were getting started, there were few books available about reptiles that were written at an appropriate level (not too technical, not too simplified), had good pictures and good stories, as well as good scientific information. Things are different today, and there is almost too much literature in the field; the shortage is not in finding things to read, but in finding time to read at all.
So one of the few books we read (many times) in those days was Ditmars’ Reptiles of the World. We learned that Ditmars had the world’s top reptile job – he was curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo. And we dreamed of having that job ourselves when we grew up. It would be so exciting that we would never want to go home at the end of the day. Well, one of our number (although we didn’t know each other in those days) did grow up to get that ultimate job, and he earned it, working his way up through the ranks of the Reptile House hierarchy. His name was John L. Behler. And in a sense he did not want to go home at the end of the day; he died “still in the saddle,” just as Ditmars had passed on in 1942, 43 years after his first appointment as Assistant Curator of Reptiles, and just one year before John Behler was born.
Because of his pivotal position in the field, a great many of the present generation of herpetologists in America (and much of the world) had met John, usually making a point of seeking him out when visiting the Big Apple. All have tales to tell, but one theme runs through all of them: how John helped them. He helped them with advice, with new contacts, with literature, even with specimens; he took time to show them round his reptile house, and passed on tips for getting rare animals to feed, to breed, or to do whatever else they were not doing and needed to do. John did not just raise reptiles, he raised herpetologists.
John helped me too in many ways, over the years. Within the last few months, he provided my turtle institute with a group of live spotted turtles that he had hatched a couple of years earlier; and he secured for me a complete shell of a very large male angonoka tortoise from Madagascar – a species of which we had no previous representation. I knew he had had a heart attack over twenty years ago, and I knew that he was having new cardiac problems. But he wouldn’t talk about it; he seemed much more interested in discussing turtles and tortoises than in talking about his health. The last time we talked on the phone, his voice was reduced to a feeble croak way beyond routine laryngitis, and he had to tell me “this is John” before I even recognized who it was. We closed the call, and I was left with a premonition that there would be sad news from New York, very soon.
But where John helped me most of all was in 1990. IUCN had decided that the Pritchard/Swingland Axis no longer represented the leadership of choice for the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group, and envoys were dispatched to break this news to me. I was hurt and angry, and I had paranoid feelings about many of my professional colleagues for a while. During this sulking phase, I composed a creative but decidedly venomous allegorical composition in which I, naturally, featured as the One who had been Wronged. John, and Mike Klemens also, responded to this with their own equally original, equally bizarre compositions, and to this day I have all filed together in a secret place. No-one will be allowed to read them for another hundred years, although it is rumored that Jim van Abbema took a peep at them many years ago. Klemens was astute enough to xerox his personal copy of my piece in case the fax should fade as the decades passed.
Anyway, the powers-that-be decided that John should be the Group Chairman. He came to me in friendship to discuss whether he should take it, and it was clear that this was not something for which he had felt any personal ambition. I gave him my blessing, we shook hands and embraced, and the Turtle Group was restored. He performed his duties well and with total integrity – his hallmark – at all times. But he also divulged that he did not intend to make the chairmanship the principal theme of his life; he also had a wife and family. There is much pressure on IUCN group chairmen nowadays to manage enormous, world-wide groups as if they were an unremitting, frenetic “chat room” of which the Chairman had to be the constant focus. John didn’t do this. I can’t blame him. Things were much easier in the old days, when a specialist group might have a dozen or so members, who communicated only when they needed to discuss an important conservation issue.
I knew John for a long time, but we actually met only episodically – at herp or turtle group meetings, more recently at TSA gatherings, or on my occasional visits to New York, or his to Orlando. But I remember especially well when we met up in Madagascar. I felt that we were acting somewhat like two male sea lions – friendly and cordial, but subtly trying to out-macho each other. I was traveling with two women (my wife Sibille, and Karen Frutchey), but John outdid me by traveling with a harem of no fewer than four females, including Dr. Bonnie Rafael. But John lost macho points when Bonnie revealed to me that John was the only member of the party to have brought a hair dryer with him; none of the ladies had considered this to be necessary. She also divulged that John had once shown up for work with his splendid head of silver hair somewhat darker than it had been the day before, the result of a discreet touch of Grecian Formula. But the good-natured hilarity that erupted in the Reptile House resulted in his never doing this again.
John, of course, won back the macho points by his habit of bonding with his son by their going big game hunting together in the west. You can’t get more macho than that. Two of my sons are marksmen and ex-military, but I always wimped out when it came to guns, and have never been a hunter. So John won this friendly contest.
One more anecdote: I once advised John that TSA was an unfortunate acronym for the Turtle Survival Alliance because TSA was a much older acronym, used for an historically ANTI-turtle organization, namely the Texas Shrimping Association, in addition to its recent use for the Transportation Security Agency (at worst a mere nuisance). He replied that it was worse than that. He had recently been reading his TSA bulletin while waiting for a flight departure, and had been approached by a somewhat lugubrious individual who had been reading over his shoulder, and introduced himself with the comment “I see you are one of US!” John didn’t recognize him, and asked what he meant. The upshot was that the man came from a fourth incarnation of TSA, namely the organization “Tourette’s Syndrome America.”
I shall miss John a lot. He was one of my most respected and loved colleagues. I always found him to be a man of total integrity, a man above the fray of petty quarrels, who would tell you the truth and never told stories behind peoples’ backs, who would find the best in everyone and emphasize it, who achieved wonders for conservation –especially of turtles – and who wrote superb field guides. Above all, he knew right from wrong, a rather rare quality nowadays. Debbie, our hearts go out to you, and we thank you for sharing him with us.
