Regional field guides generally beat the Audubon or Peterson guides hands-down when it comes to descriptions of local ranges, subspecies, and habitat. Some guides provide only limited information in the interest of keeping their size down, sacrificing their usefulness as a reference for their pocketability (e.g. MacCullough’s ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario). Other guides provide authoritative information in rich, comprehensive quantities, but in a thick book that is kind of hard to carry with you — they’re more textbooks than field guides (e.g. Harding’s Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region or Werler and Dixon’s Texas Snakes). Both methods produce good field guides; it’s just a matter of which kind of guide you need: pocketable or definitive.

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First published in Ark’Type, Aug.-Sept.-Oct. 2003.

Ontarians have not had a field guide to their reptiles and amphibians for some time, at least not since Bob Johnson’s Familiar Reptiles and Amphibians of Ontario (1989). Whereas Johnson’s little book was illustrated with black-and-white sketches that may or may not have resembled the actual animal in question, this new pocket guide is a showcase for excellent herp photography, giving each species native to Ontario three full-colour photographs on the facing page of each written description.

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First published in The Ontario Herpetological Society News 92 (July 2002).

Work began on this book twenty years ago, the authors inform us in the preface. Even taking into account the fact that for most of that period, the authors had other responsibilities and could not have worked full-time on this project, that seems an awfully long time to spend on a single work. Looking at the book, though, it is easy to see why. It has all the usual sections you would expect from such a guide: a general introduction, an identification key, a note on venom, an extensive bibliography and, of course, species and subspecies accounts. But those accounts have a level of detail and thoroughness that are unmatched by any other guide, including Tennant’s Field Guide to Texas Snakes, and each gives an in-depth survey of the scientific knowledge of the snake in question. With so much attention paid to each of Texas’s 109 species and subspecies, no wonder it took so long.

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First published in The Ontario Herpetological Society News 87 (Dec. 2000).

The study of fossil snakes is not nearly as accessible as you might expect. It’s highly specialized work that doesn’t excite the popular imagination nearly as much as a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The following quotation from Fossil Snakes of North America is instructive:

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First published in The Ontario Herpetological Society News 87 (Dec. 2000).

Corn snakes, for snakes that are comparatively easy to keep — corn snakes are to herpetoculture what boiling water is to cooking: screw that up and you probably shouldn’t try anything else — are a lot more complicated than they used to be. In 1991, Michael J. McEachern’s Color Guide to Corn Snakes described a handful of single- and double-recessive mutations and a couple of distinctive locality morphs. Now there are more morphs than I myself can keep track of, and it’s kind of hard to figure out what they all are.

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First published in The Ontario Herpetological Society News 85 (Spring 2000).

Snake nuts will want to know about these books. If, like me, they are particularly fond of North American snakes, they may already own copies of the three field guides already published by Gulf: A Field Guide to Snakes of Florida and A Field Guide to Texas Snakes (the latter already in its second edition), both by Alan Tennant, and A Field Guide to Snakes of California by Philip Brown. Brown’s guide is not as satisfying as the two by Tennant, which provide a heady amount of information on each subspecies, more than could be found in any other field guide. And while Texas and Florida have a lot of snakes between the two of them, I couldn’t help but want even more — information on the snakes that didn’t live in either state.

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First published in The Ontario Herpetological Society News 84 (Winter 2000).

The first edition of Chris Mattison’s Keeping and Breeding Snakes appeared in 1988. This second, “fully revised” edition is no mere updating of an earlier work; it is essentially an entirely new book. Its emphases have changed and its text — especially its species accounts — has been rewritten. Gone are the tables with breeding information, and the section on keeping venomous snakes has been reduced to almost an afterthought. The new photographs are nothing less than spectacular, in far more vivid colour than in previous Blandford offerings. In all, the package is quite attractive.

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First published in The Ontario Herpetological Society News 83 (Fall 1999).