The family connexion between ‘the father of American mammalogy’ and Hong Kong Country Parks

I have known the name Merriam for 65 years since I kept a Merriam’s Kangaroo Rat (Dipodomys merriami), a wonderful animal, for several years. For anybody unfamiliar with kangaroo rats, they are essentially bipedal, parallel evolution versions of the jerboas. Until I was looking up pocket gophers a few weeks ago after out trip to Mexico I had not given Clinton Hart Merriam much attention. To my surprise I found there was a family connection to an important figure in the conservation of Hong Kong and world wildlife in the latter half of the 20th entry.

CLINTON HART MERRIAM (1855-1942) is remembered as important figure in American mammalogy. However, he had wide interests in just about anything alive before while working as a family doctor. By what was clearly a bit of political help from his cousin, a senator, and his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, he became the first chief of what became Division of Biological Survey of the US Department of Agriculture, a post he held for 25 years. In later life though he abandoned these pursuits for ethnology, having become fascinated by the indigenous inhabitants of California and the western parts of the USA.

These days Merriam is often referred to as an out of control ‘splitter’ and erector of new species. Thus he described 86 species of jus the one Brown Bear in North America. Clearly though Merriam was important in both the natural history of North America and in the conservation of wildlife.

Clinton Hart Merriam

It was Merriam's grandson, LEE MERRIAM TALBOT (1930-2021) who was to have such an important role in world wildlife conservation, becoming head of IUCN from 1980 to 1983 and leading key pieces of U.S. and international legislation. Talbot was the action man of conservation in the early 1960s while working for IUCN, researching the status of endangered animals and habitats in many parts of reports while producing reports for governments and conservation bodies. In that work he worked closely with his wife, Marty (born 1932). South-east Asia was a particular focus in the early 1960s and his report for the Agriculture and Fisheries Department of the Hong Kong Government was produced as the result of, what I read, was a three-week trip in 1965.

Reports indicate that the work for the report was not without incident:

“While conducting an aerial survey for the government of British Hong Kong in the early 1960s, his plane experienced mechanical problems, and crash landed in a harbor, hitting rocks and pinwheeling through the cold, frothing water,” explained his son Russell. “He swam to safety, later describing in vivid detail the difficulty of determining which direction was up, while escaping the still-tumbling wreckage.”

Lee Merriam Talbot
from HERE

Lee Talbot was also a racing driver. He began at the age of 18 and had his last race at the age of 87. It seems 1965 was an unfortunate year. An account of motor racing accidents shows that in 4 July 1965 while he was based in Hong Kong he walked away from an accident that may well have killed him. In a Formule Libre race in Malaysia his Lotus Super-7 ran off the road and overturned into a drain, pinning Talbot under the car. His high quality helmet kept the weight of the car off his head. Another driver was killed in the same race

The Talbots’ work in south-east Asia all came together at a conference in Bangkok on 29 November-4 December 1965 organised by IUCN. The Talbots edited the proceedings which appeared in 1968. By the time the conference was held he had been recruited as ‘Smithsonian Field Representative for International Affairs in Ecology and Conservation’ in Washington DC.

Nothing happened to implement the Talbots’ report until the 1970s. The Hong Kong government was soon dealing with the communist-inspired riots of 1967 and their aftermath. The administrators of the time were not known for alacrity in their attitude to change and it was not until Murray MacLehose was appointed governor in1971 that much was done. Then work started on the Country Parks for recreation and conservation envisaged in 1965. The Country Parks Ordinance came into effect in 1976 with the first parks officially designated in 1977. At present there are 24 covering an area of 440 square kilometres.

Reading between the lines I suspect the Talbot report was the necessary icing on the cake of a movement within Hong Kong to create areas suitable for recreation and conservation. The pressure to obtain an external expert report seems likely to have come from individuals within the Hong Kong government itself, from the several amateur societies concerned with wildlife and the countryside (of which government officials were also members) and members of the university (there was only one then) staff from the botany, geography and zoology departments. Plans for some protected areas/parks had already been drawn up by the time the Talbots arrived for their short visit.

In 2013 Lee Talbot himself explained (HERE) the intergenerational interest in wildlife and conservation:

I grew up in a conservation family with endangered species conservation as part of my heritage. My maternal grandfather was Dr. C. Hart Merriam, founder and first head of the Biological Survey which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A pioneer ecologist, he may be best known for the life zone theory of distribution of plants and animals which was a foundation of ecology for perhaps a half century. My mother was an ethnologist and naturalist, very concerned with conservation. And my father, M.W. Talbot, was a pioneer range and wildlife ecologist who, after years of field work in the southwest, was director of the California Forest and Range Experiment Station, the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service, and a professor at University of California, Berkeley. A lifelong conservationist, in 1924 he worked with his Forest Service friend, Aldo Leopold, initiating the Gila, the nation’s first wilderness area; helped with the early days of the Wilderness Society; was a founder of the Society for Range Management; and constantly worked for conservation and science-based sustainable management of the nation’s forests and rangelands.

     Hiking, camping and pack trips in the wilderness with the wonderful conservation and ecological insights and guidance of my parents was an integral part of my early years….

The Country Parks of Hong Kong in 2025
from HERE

Who connects a tropical lizard to a Hong Kong landmark, the U.S. president’s office…and a misspelt name?

For the answer let’s start in Washington D.C. where the president sits at a desk given to him by Queen Victoria. Her Majesty’s Ship Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic by the Royal Navy while searching for the lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin in 1854. The ship broke free from the ice the next summer and was found by an American whaler. It was repaired and returned to Britain by the U.S. government as a gesture of goodwill at a time when the president had been threatening British interests and wanting to annex Canada. In 1879 Resolute was decommissioned and three desks were made from its oak timbers. One of those desks was sent to Washington and was received at the White House on 23 November 1880.

The naval officer in charge of the five-ship squadron sent to search for Franklin was Edward Belcher.

Edward Belcher

It was Belcher, commanding HMS Sulphur, who was given the job of surveying Hong Kong harbour in 1841. He was present, having landed a day earlier, at the ceremony to take over Hong Kong on 26 January. Belcher’s Battery overlooking Hong Kong harbour was named after him when it was constructed in the 1880s. The battery was replaced by housing for government employees in the 1950s. That complex, Belcher’s Gardens*, in turn was replaced by six tower blocks with the name still retained—but oddly phrased—as The Belcher’s.

Hemidactylus brookii, a gecko, was thus named by John Edward Gray (1800-1875) of the British Museum in his catalogue of lizards of 1854. Two specimens from Borneo were given to the museum by Edward Belcher, presumably on his return to London on 31 December 1847. They were collected in 1843 when Belcher was in command of another survey ship HMS Samarang working on the north coast of Borneo. I will return to the gecko later. But first the man linking all these events and many more besides.

I have written previously on Belcher HERE. Edward Belcher was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1793. He joined the Royal Navy, at the usual age for an officer of 13, as a midshipman. His reputation can only be described as dichotomous. He was widely praised as a hydrographic surveyor, geographer and promoter of the natural sciences, his activities continuing after his retirement from the active navy list. By contrast, he was thoroughly loathed by almost all those he came into contact with whether his peers, his seniors or his juniors on board his ships.

Back with the gecko, here is Gray’s description of the beast.

In Borneo—and Sarawak in particular—Belcher was in close contact with and supporting the famous White Rajah, Sir James Brooke (1803-1868), in his efforts to clear pirates from the seas. Subsequent publications treat the gecko as having been named in honour of James Brooke. However it would appear that Gray did not know that Brooke had an ‘e’ on the end because he published the common  name as ‘Brook’s Hemidactylus’ and the specific name as ‘brookii’. In his 1854 catalogue he lists people who had donated specimens to the Museum. He shows Belcher in the list as well as ‘J. Brooks, Esq’. However, searching the volume there is no further mention of Brooks or Brooke. But we have ‘Brook’s’ and ‘brookii’ in the description of the gecko. Perhaps Belcher had intimated to Gray or his boss a patronym for Brooke woukld go down well but that Gray did not know of Brooke and how to spell his name.

Albert Günther in reviewing the reptiles and amphibians of Borneo in 1872 clearly realised the central role of James Brooke:

The first extensive collections received in Europe were from two localities :—1…. …2. From the principality of Sarawak, where Sir J. Brooke, Sir E. Belcher, and Mr. Low paid for a considerable period much attention to the fauna. The collections made by them were presented to the British Museum, and described partly by Dr. Gray, and partly more recently by the author in the Catalogues of the British Museum and in the ‘ Reptiles of British India.’…

Sir James Brooke
late 1850s. By Herbert Watkins
Natonal Portrait Gallery

Because of the evidence that the patronym was coined for James Brooke, some authors now use ‘Brooke’s Gecko’ for the common name.

But what of the gecko itself. When I was a lad Hemidactylus brookii was seen as a very widely distributed species of the tropics that, along with other species of gecko, had been transported by ship to other countries, like South America and parts of south-east Asia to which it was not native. Africa was regarded as its stronghold. In more recent decades H. brookii has been looked at more closely. Is it just one species or a number of different species that had either not been recognised or lumped into H. brookii by the early generations of taxonomists. And what a can of worms H. brookii has proved to be.

One of the problems stems from the way in which taxonomists worked. Taxonomist A would receive a specimen and decide if it was like anything else he had seen or been recorded. If not he would give it a new scientific name. Taxonomist B probably working in a different country would receive a similar specimen and, unaware of the work of A or disagreeing with him, would give it a different scientific name. Those coming later would gain access to both specimens or descriptions and declare them to be of the same species, or not. If the same they were synonymous and lumped into a single species, the name having priority being the earliest to have reached publication. The problem is that taxonomists usually gave no reason, either quantitative or qualitative, why they had reached their conclusion. Such decisions taken in the past, decided solely on morphological features of pickled specimens, have to be question in the light of the application of quantitative methods and/or non-morphological evidence like DNA. Depending on the ‘species concept’ being used by particular modern taxonomists, decisions are made on whether or not those old taxonomists were right or wrong, or perhaps I should say more likely to be right or more likely to be wrong since there is still disagreement as to what constitutes a species. Some of the concepts used seem nonsensical to outsiders like me and remind me of the drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp when he had dropped them further down the road in the dark on the grounds that it was easier to search where he could see. The complexity of what has been going on with regard to Brooke’s Gecko can be seen in the taxonomy section of the entry for the species in the IUCN’s Red List HERE together with the relevant references.

The present state appears to be that H. brookii has been split asunder. The African forms previously included in H. brookii have been assigned to a different but previously synonymised species (H. angulatus described by Edward Hallowell in 1854) leaving Asia as the natural range. Further studies on Asian specimens in museums indicate that other forms regarded as synonyms in the past should be reinstated while others should be brought back in.

Distribution of H. brookii from the IUCN Red List

Distribution of H. angulatus from the IUCN Red Data List

In a final twist to the story of Belcher, Brooke’s Gecko is now known to occur in Hong Kong. First reported in 1978, one location, St Louis School, is a few hundred metres from The Belcher’s; a large warehouse for imported goods once stood on the opposite side of the road.

Brooke's Gecko
from Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles - see below

James Brooke is buried in the churchyard of St Leonard's, Sheepstor, on the edge of Dartmoor: I tooke these photographs in September 2012:

Memorial Plaque to the Brooke Rajahs of Sarawak

*Belcher’s Battery and then Belcher’s Gardens were overlooked by the main teaching laboratory cum museum of the zoology department of the University of Hong Kong when it was in the now-demolished Northcote Science Building.

Gray JE. 1845. Catalogue of the specimens of lizards in the collection of the British Museum. London: Trustees of the British Museum/Edward Newman.

Karsen SJ, Lau M W-N, Bogadek A. 1998. Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles. Second Edition. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council. ISBN 962-7849-05-7

A Pocket Gopher in the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacán in Mexico. But which pocket gopher?

Seeing a rodent in the wild is always a good day—even if the taxonomy is complicated and I am confused.

A  pocket gopher was an animal we were looking out for when we were at the pre-Aztec archaeological site Teotihuacán near Mexico City last month. Lots of signs of their excavations near the entrance at the southern end of the site and eventually one was seen emerging from its burrow every couple of minutes to push earth out of the burrow and on to the soil heap. Pocket gophers can use their upper front incisors for digging because the mouth can be closed behind the teeth.

Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán

Pocket Gophers are thus called because they have fur-lined cheek pouches that are used to stash food on their forays above ground. They belong to the all-American (in the proper, wide, sense of the word American) rodent family, Geomyidae.

The excavations of the pocket gophers can be seen in this area near the southern gate

The large teeth can be seen in this frame from my video

The taxonomy of pocket gophers is complicated. The current position, shown in the IUCN Red List, is that Teotihuacán is shown as being in the range of the Smoky Pocket Gopher (Cratogeomys fumosus) but not of Merriam’s Pocket Gopher (Cratogeomys merriami) even though specimens collected there in the past have been identified as belonging to one or the other of the two species. Thus modern photographs of the pocket gophers at Teotihuacán are captioned as Cratogeomys fumosus.

To complicate matters further Merriam’s Pocket Gopher was named for Clinton Hart Merriam (1855-1942) by Oldfield Thomas of the Natural History Museum in London in 1893 while the Smoky Pocket Gopher was named by Merriam himself in 1892.

A paper published in 2005 which showed the results of morphometric, chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA analysis, indicates that specimens, apparently accepted as C. merriami have been collected only about 15 miles to the south of Teotihuacán. Is there then still doubt as to the identity of the pocket gopher to be seen at that ancient site? A specimen held in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in the University of California was used in the morphological analysis of specimens C. merriami but not referred to specifically. Did it fit perfectly the criteria in the key to identification shown in the paper? Similarly, where does a specimen in the collection of the University of Kansas collected at Teotihuacán, labelled as C. fumosus and was used in the analysis in a 2004 paper fit in?

In my confusion I should end with the question: does anybody have definitive information on the identity of of the pocket gopher at Teotihuacán? Were we looking at the species named by Merriam or the one named for Merriam?

…I am not though confused as to the route taken from London to Mexico City. We flew over the Gulf of Mexico.

Hafner MS, Spradling TA, Light, JE, Hafner DJ, Demboski JR. 2004. Systematic revision of pocket gophers of the Cratageomys gymnurus species group. Journal of Mammalogy 85, 1170-1183.

Hafner MS, Light, JE, Hafner DJ, Brant SV, Spradling TA, Demastes JW. 2005. Cryptic species in the Mexican pocket gopher Cratageomys merriami. Journal of Mammalogy 86, 1095-1108.

Merriam, CH. 1892. Descriptions of nine new mammals collected by E. W. Nelson in the states of Colima and Jalisco, Mexico. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 7,164-174.

Thomas O. 1893. On some of the larger species of Geomys. Annals and Magazine of Natural History. 6th Series. 12, 269-273.

‘The Aurochs Lives Again’. A heck of a load of old bullocks

Animal Life, May 1963

Last year I wrote an article about the short-lived British magazine Animal Life from the early 1960s (see here). I found a letter in the July 1963 issue I had written to the editor in response to an article in the May 1963 issue entitled ‘Extinct Animals Live Again’. That article dealt with the cross-breeding done by the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck to recreate the Aurochs and the Tarpan from domestic breeds of cattle and horses respectively The article treated the whole thing as a great success for the Hecks and for zoos in general. But anybody with an iota of knowledge of genetics would have known that the Hecks were naive in their basic premise. Reversing the effects of domestication was never going to occur by selecting for superficial resemblance to the wild type. They simple created other domestic breeds.

Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (1900-1981) a journalist and amateur naturalist who looked after letters and queries from readers (and may have been the editor) added a note to say that the topic was a’ stormy’ and that many ‘zoologists’ were convinced by the Hecks’ experiments. Well, there were many ‘zoologists’ often self-styled, around in the 1950s and 60s, who had opinions but little real knowledge or scientific background. In Britain the claims of bringing back the ancestral forms became well known in the 1950s, probably, I suggest as the result of Heinz Heck writing an article for Oryx, the journal of the Fauna Preservation Society, in 1951.

When I located the original article in Animal Life I found that its author was Philip Street.

Fast forward over 60 years and the cattle the Hecks bred are now listed simply as another breed of domestic ox: Heck Cattle. No surprise there.

Over those same sixty-odd years, the truth about Lutz Heck (1892-1983), who was trying to breed aurochs in order to re-wild parts of Europe captured by his fellow Nazi-party members (see my article here and an article in the Smithsonian Magazine here) has emerged, even though the records of the Berlin Zoo, which he ran, are still closed to enquiry. Hermann Göring was his patron with a shared interest in recreating the fatherland’s historical landscapes and in hunting the animals they housed. Heinz Heck (1894-1982) the younger brother, by contrast, was held at Dachau for a time as a suspected member of the communist party and fir having been married briefly to a Jew. Both were responsible for the breeding experiments and it was Heinz who wrote about them after the war.

But there are still people out there who believe that it is possible to recreated these extinct forms by cross-breeding modern breeds. Those same people though must contend that nothing happened in terms of gene mutations and intensive artificial selection during domestication. No… I don’t buy that one either.

Heck Cattle at a wildlife park in Germany in 2011
From Wikipedia. Photo by 4028mdk09