"... But this one goes to ... eleven" - Nigel Tufnel
In the double digits. Eleven consecutive days. Blogging. Vomiting my thoughts. If you've agreed with all I've written one of us isn't trying hard enough.
Interesting numhers: My last blog (#10 - Pseudo Dealers & Weekend Warriors) has been viewed the most of all followed closely by #9 - Don't Ship by USPS (or give a penny to those who do). That doesn't surprise me. Then it's #1 - Resurrection. Least viewed is #5 - Sunday, Fun Day. Not sure I understand why. I would have thought readers would read most, if not all, of the posts if they're interested in reading what I have to say. But I'm pleased that my big rants reach the largest audience.
Interesting numhers: My last blog (#10 - Pseudo Dealers & Weekend Warriors) has been viewed the most of all followed closely by #9 - Don't Ship by USPS (or give a penny to those who do). That doesn't surprise me. Then it's #1 - Resurrection. Least viewed is #5 - Sunday, Fun Day. Not sure I understand why. I would have thought readers would read most, if not all, of the posts if they're interested in reading what I have to say. But I'm pleased that my big rants reach the largest audience.
Last few posts have been pretty rant heavy so let's say HAPPY WEEKEND and tone it down a notch. I am very excited at seeing my dear friends Mark, Kim and Brandon tomorrow and am in a non-rant mood, at least until I leave my man cave and encounter the masses. I've got Chad, Jason, Randy, Jaimie, David, Alec and hopefully Apple coming to visit next week. All is good. My fridge is stocked with Tiger lager and Chad is bringing me a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel and a growler of Indeed Brewery Mexican Honey Imperial Lager. Jason is bringing some killer wings. The house will have spider people and other visitors viewing my collection. Mark will be inking and we'll be shooting firearms (but not at each other). Monday night we're hitting a Cubs night game after a day of touring Chicago, the greatest city in the world. May the rains cooperate.
So it's your last chance to provoke me with a controversial question for tomorrow's Sunday questions. I have a couple of the most frequently asked of me in reserve, but I've been begging to be challenged. Is Elowsky reading this? Apple did make a few topic suggestions in some Faffbook comments so I do have a few in reserve for the future, but they weren't provocative questions.
MEMORY LANE
During yesterday's blog on dealers good and bad I mentioned just a few of the many that have left the hobby. My fellow old-timers Apple and Frank Somma took to my Facebook page to engage each other with some blasts from the past - names like James Coffey, Russell Smith, Dale Marantz and Allan McKee. McKee is particularly important as he was among the first successful and prolific breeders along with my mentor Ralph Henning.
Once upon a time, there was a teenager who loved snakes and spiders. He was a smart kid who didn't need to study to do well in school and never learned to. He decided to study zoology in college and started courses in 1982. He had horrendous (non-existent) study habits, sudden freedom from parental control and a love of partying. These and other factors conspired to make his university stay short. His dream of a zoology Ph.D. seemed unlikely. That would take at least seven years of serious study. But it was keeping and breeding snakes and spiders that really appealed to him anyway. He got a job at a huge pet store, perhaps the first pet superstore before today's before big box stores like Home Depot, Office Max, Wal-mart, Best Buy and Petco & Petsmart existed. Noah's Ark Pet Center was an Illinois chain of 20+ pet stores and the headquarters store was likely then the biggest pet store in the US at the time. All the other stores received their animals from the HQ location in Arlington Heights each week. Our college dropout - me, of course - quickly got the job of reptile keeper when I brought a few snakes to my interview. Very quickly I became assistant manager and then not long afterward was promoted to reptile and small animal manager for the chain. Snakes and tarantulas were my domain, not to mention lizards, ferrets, prairie dogs, hamsters and such. This was the beginning of my long pet industry career.
At Noah's Ark I met two guys who would have an impact on my future with reptiles and tarantulas. They both became my mentors and were frequent Noah's Ark visitors. Scott, my snake guy, we will overlook at least for now, but may he appear in a later blog. However, Ralph Henning is an important, albeit mostly unknown, name in United States tarantulaculture. I mentioned him in the dedication to my "Tarantulas" book as without Ralph I may have just always been a snake guy who liked spiders. He came into Noah's Ark regularly to pick through our tarantula inventory, and he introduced me to the hobby outside of the pet trade. Ralph had access to spiders that were not in my inventory. The regular items on my shelves were "red leg" tarantulas - Brachypelma smithi, which we now call "red-knee", Phormictopus cancerides ("Haitian brown"), Haplopelma lividum ("Cobalt blue"), Asian Earth Tiger (Haplopelma sp., probably what is now H. vonwirthi - all the Haplopelma were then known as "Melopoeus"), Brachypelma vagans ("Velvet Red-rump") and Avicularia avicularia ("pink toes"). This is before "rose hairs" became the pet trade staple. I'd have a few oddball things once in a while, but mostly just 6-8 species and only wild-caught adults. I remember one day getting a shipment of 100 adult Brachypelma smithi that we paid $2.50 each for! It was horrible as they had been packed in baggies closed with twist-ties and many were dead or at least missing legs with the broken appendages in the baggie. This is 1983 and it is the pioneer days of the tarantula hobby.
Ralph would later also be a bit of a mentor to the late Bryant Capiz, but this is long before Bryant got into the hobby. Ralph would come to Noah's Ark and pick through my new spiders and, before long, he would ask me if I wanted some tarantula, scorpion or centipede I had never heard of before. I discovered that Ralph had access to cool stuff and was friends with a Canadian named Rick West. Most readers know of Rick today, but this is over 30 years ago and my tarantula world was expanding. Rick was not a well-known tarantula authority yet, but he obviously was a great source of information for Ralph, which would then be distilled down to me. Ralph would call me and tell me everything Rick said each time they spoke via telephone and it was clear he was a pipeline to new species. Ralph was also friendly with another Canadian named Stanley Schultz and told me about a guy who was starting to captive breed some cool stuff out in the Pacific Northwest. I asked for an address and soon began corresponding with Allan McKee of Kenmore, Washington.
Al McKee & Ralph Henning are the true pioneering breeders of U.S. tarantulas. Sadly, today's Arachnoboards and Faffbook junkies don't know their stories. It was Al that actually made me aware of the British Tarantula Society, the world's oldest ongoing tarantula society and the organization where I am proud to serve as North American Coordinator. When Al started writing articles for the society it was still known as the British Tarantula Fellowship and it's publication was the "Newsletter", not today's prestigious Journal. Allan self-published a few books titled Tarantula Observations that were the first American texts with breeding information. He made a June 1983 trip to Costa Rica to collect Aphonopelma seemanni (then Rhecostica seemanni), which he bred successfully. Our hobby's early "stripe-knees" were the beautiful dark black and white specimens that are tough to come by today. I soon had baby food jars of Al's and Ralph's babies and the list of available species from "Al's Tarantula Ranch" was becoming longer. Take a look at these images scanned this morning from my library of Al's second publication Tarantula Observations Vol. II, A Guide to Breeding, which he printed in 1984 via his own "Tarantula Ranch Press" and documents his breeding of seemanni. The only photo in the spiral-bound and photocopied book was a print of one of his Costa Rican "Zebras" that was actually taped to the title page.
1984 was an enlightening year. I had built up a nice personal collection of "Melopoeus" sp. and a spider I really loved, Phormictopus cancerides, plus was raising CAPTIVE BRED babies that had been sourced all through Ralph, but some were from Al or Rick or a couple of other new strangers. My snake room had a walk-in closet full of tarantulas and my two passions were on equal footing. Allan's book became well-thumbed. He had diagrams of enclosures, lists of species I had never seen and tales of collecting in a foreign land. Meanwhile, Ralph and I became closer friends and I became part of a circle of tarantula keepers that included Rick, Al and Stan Schultz. (Some readers may laugh at the latter inclusion. This was 30 years ago and much changes). Soon Ralph asked me if I wanted to make a trip to Texas to collect tarantulas. He said we would meet Stanley and his wife Marguerite down there. I didn't know much about them yet, but I was 21 and a road trip to the desert to hunt tarantulas was the best offer I had ever had. I remember the day we left very well. It was the first time I cried over a girl. I had fallen in love with a girl that worked in Noah's Ark's bird department named Jodie and this would be our first separation. Young love ... even me ....
My first impression upon meeting them was that they were an odd trio. Marguerite was much older than Stan and I thought she was his mother at first. They struck me as quite eccentric. She freaked out at moths and would start acting crazy and speaking in tongues. I shit you not. I was beginning to wonder if the trip was such a good idea. The young guy, I'm almost positive his name was Rob, had a pet shop in Calgary called "Animal House" and he gave me a pin that advertised their "Tarantula Day". I soon discovered that Rob and the Schultz's were keeping every single arthropod or herp they encountered to take back to Canada. If it moved it went into an empty yogurt cup. Anything. I'll let you infer whether or not it was Kosher for them to cross the border with their haul. But I quickly became upset that they were mass collecting with little regard to habitat. I thought a few hundred Centruroides scorpions was a little greedy. Tarantulas were flushed out of burrows and if they don't flush out and you don't successfully dig them out, they will drown in their own chamber. By trip's end I was not a happy camper. I was not a fan of Mr. Schultz then and I am not today.
This is when Stan first wrote "The Tarantula Keeper's Guide". I'll save a whole blog for my thoughts on that book later. Stay tuned. But this is the first edition and it was admittedly ground-breaking in the mid-80s. This is pre-Barron's. His original "TKG" was published by Sterling and his wife's name was not included as author. He gave me a signed copy of the brand new book once I handed him the cover price in cold cash (see pix). The cover was of their "Duchess" a large Brachypelma emilia being, of course, handled. The inscription Stan scribbled out at that scorching Texas border country rest stop is pretty much verbatim what he signs today. Ralph and I made the best of the trip, which I also recall included getting hassled by the border police. I don't know Ralph's heritage, but it's not Hispanic. However, with a Texas tan his dark complexion and thick mustache made him look like a Mexican. So we were stopped a number of times for identification as we worked our way west along the Rio Grande towards Del Rio where we would find Aphonopelma moderatum. Today this species has been over-collected by one unscrupulous individual in particular (Al Bazaar), but back then they were unknown and became the coolest tarantulas in my collection. Ralph and I only took what we wished to keep for ourselves, despite our companions doing otherwise. It seemed a Calgary pet store was going to have a huge inventory of Texas invertebrates as long as the RV wasn't searched at the border.
FEEDING & NETFLIX
I spend a great deal of time feeding spiders. The big ones in the terrariums I care for in the spider room with some music going, usually of the progressive metal variety, but also soundtracks, "classical", Latin guitar and classic/southern rock and jambands. But when I'm feeding trays and trays of the little ones I sit at my workstation with Netflix running on my Mac. I binge watch television shows, because I've seen every good movie and new good movies are rare. Many popular shows I came to late (e.g., Breaking Bad & The Walking Dead) as I didn't even own a television for many years and never streamed online. So I had catching up to do and have watched both all the way through several times. Here are some past and present TV shows that I like in no particular order. I hope you discover something cool and new. An Idiot Abroad, Derek, Game of Thrones (can't believe the new season already ends Sunday), True Detective (season 2 starting), Bloodline, House of Cards, The Wire, SOA, Orange is the New Black (Season 3 now streaming), Hannibal, Sherlock, The Killing, Wayward Pines, The Following, The Americans, Longmire, Scrotal Recall, Skins, Inside Amy Schumer (funniest comic ever!) ... which leads me to some stand up routines like Amy, Iliza, Stanhope, Norton, Rogan, Aziz, etc...
But feeding spiders is what I do. Coffee, Blog & Email, Breakfast, Shower, Errands and then it's me feeding little bugs to bigger bugs while my Mac runs Netflix. Occasionally, I get out. But today is another feeding day as guests are coming and I'm going to mostly ignore my spider room for a week. Time for another cuppa. Have a lovely weekend, MJ
MEMORY LANE
During yesterday's blog on dealers good and bad I mentioned just a few of the many that have left the hobby. My fellow old-timers Apple and Frank Somma took to my Facebook page to engage each other with some blasts from the past - names like James Coffey, Russell Smith, Dale Marantz and Allan McKee. McKee is particularly important as he was among the first successful and prolific breeders along with my mentor Ralph Henning.
Once upon a time, there was a teenager who loved snakes and spiders. He was a smart kid who didn't need to study to do well in school and never learned to. He decided to study zoology in college and started courses in 1982. He had horrendous (non-existent) study habits, sudden freedom from parental control and a love of partying. These and other factors conspired to make his university stay short. His dream of a zoology Ph.D. seemed unlikely. That would take at least seven years of serious study. But it was keeping and breeding snakes and spiders that really appealed to him anyway. He got a job at a huge pet store, perhaps the first pet superstore before today's before big box stores like Home Depot, Office Max, Wal-mart, Best Buy and Petco & Petsmart existed. Noah's Ark Pet Center was an Illinois chain of 20+ pet stores and the headquarters store was likely then the biggest pet store in the US at the time. All the other stores received their animals from the HQ location in Arlington Heights each week. Our college dropout - me, of course - quickly got the job of reptile keeper when I brought a few snakes to my interview. Very quickly I became assistant manager and then not long afterward was promoted to reptile and small animal manager for the chain. Snakes and tarantulas were my domain, not to mention lizards, ferrets, prairie dogs, hamsters and such. This was the beginning of my long pet industry career.
At Noah's Ark I met two guys who would have an impact on my future with reptiles and tarantulas. They both became my mentors and were frequent Noah's Ark visitors. Scott, my snake guy, we will overlook at least for now, but may he appear in a later blog. However, Ralph Henning is an important, albeit mostly unknown, name in United States tarantulaculture. I mentioned him in the dedication to my "Tarantulas" book as without Ralph I may have just always been a snake guy who liked spiders. He came into Noah's Ark regularly to pick through our tarantula inventory, and he introduced me to the hobby outside of the pet trade. Ralph had access to spiders that were not in my inventory. The regular items on my shelves were "red leg" tarantulas - Brachypelma smithi, which we now call "red-knee", Phormictopus cancerides ("Haitian brown"), Haplopelma lividum ("Cobalt blue"), Asian Earth Tiger (Haplopelma sp., probably what is now H. vonwirthi - all the Haplopelma were then known as "Melopoeus"), Brachypelma vagans ("Velvet Red-rump") and Avicularia avicularia ("pink toes"). This is before "rose hairs" became the pet trade staple. I'd have a few oddball things once in a while, but mostly just 6-8 species and only wild-caught adults. I remember one day getting a shipment of 100 adult Brachypelma smithi that we paid $2.50 each for! It was horrible as they had been packed in baggies closed with twist-ties and many were dead or at least missing legs with the broken appendages in the baggie. This is 1983 and it is the pioneer days of the tarantula hobby.
Ralph would later also be a bit of a mentor to the late Bryant Capiz, but this is long before Bryant got into the hobby. Ralph would come to Noah's Ark and pick through my new spiders and, before long, he would ask me if I wanted some tarantula, scorpion or centipede I had never heard of before. I discovered that Ralph had access to cool stuff and was friends with a Canadian named Rick West. Most readers know of Rick today, but this is over 30 years ago and my tarantula world was expanding. Rick was not a well-known tarantula authority yet, but he obviously was a great source of information for Ralph, which would then be distilled down to me. Ralph would call me and tell me everything Rick said each time they spoke via telephone and it was clear he was a pipeline to new species. Ralph was also friendly with another Canadian named Stanley Schultz and told me about a guy who was starting to captive breed some cool stuff out in the Pacific Northwest. I asked for an address and soon began corresponding with Allan McKee of Kenmore, Washington.
Al McKee & Ralph Henning are the true pioneering breeders of U.S. tarantulas. Sadly, today's Arachnoboards and Faffbook junkies don't know their stories. It was Al that actually made me aware of the British Tarantula Society, the world's oldest ongoing tarantula society and the organization where I am proud to serve as North American Coordinator. When Al started writing articles for the society it was still known as the British Tarantula Fellowship and it's publication was the "Newsletter", not today's prestigious Journal. Allan self-published a few books titled Tarantula Observations that were the first American texts with breeding information. He made a June 1983 trip to Costa Rica to collect Aphonopelma seemanni (then Rhecostica seemanni), which he bred successfully. Our hobby's early "stripe-knees" were the beautiful dark black and white specimens that are tough to come by today. I soon had baby food jars of Al's and Ralph's babies and the list of available species from "Al's Tarantula Ranch" was becoming longer. Take a look at these images scanned this morning from my library of Al's second publication Tarantula Observations Vol. II, A Guide to Breeding, which he printed in 1984 via his own "Tarantula Ranch Press" and documents his breeding of seemanni. The only photo in the spiral-bound and photocopied book was a print of one of his Costa Rican "Zebras" that was actually taped to the title page.
1984 was an enlightening year. I had built up a nice personal collection of "Melopoeus" sp. and a spider I really loved, Phormictopus cancerides, plus was raising CAPTIVE BRED babies that had been sourced all through Ralph, but some were from Al or Rick or a couple of other new strangers. My snake room had a walk-in closet full of tarantulas and my two passions were on equal footing. Allan's book became well-thumbed. He had diagrams of enclosures, lists of species I had never seen and tales of collecting in a foreign land. Meanwhile, Ralph and I became closer friends and I became part of a circle of tarantula keepers that included Rick, Al and Stan Schultz. (Some readers may laugh at the latter inclusion. This was 30 years ago and much changes). Soon Ralph asked me if I wanted to make a trip to Texas to collect tarantulas. He said we would meet Stanley and his wife Marguerite down there. I didn't know much about them yet, but I was 21 and a road trip to the desert to hunt tarantulas was the best offer I had ever had. I remember the day we left very well. It was the first time I cried over a girl. I had fallen in love with a girl that worked in Noah's Ark's bird department named Jodie and this would be our first separation. Young love ... even me ....
Ralph and I drove to Texas and it was the first time I had been away with anyone other than my family. Ralph is about 8 or 9 years older than me and I figured he knew what we were doing. He had been to Texas in search of tarantulas before. We drove and we hunted. A few days later, at a rest area near Eagle Pass, Texas we encountered an RV that contained Stan and Marguerite and a younger guy about my age who ran a pet store in Calgary. Ralph and I had collected some Aphonopelma and I'd also found a Berlandier's tortoise. The tortoise was released before we met the Schultz's, which I would be very grateful for later.
My first impression upon meeting them was that they were an odd trio. Marguerite was much older than Stan and I thought she was his mother at first. They struck me as quite eccentric. She freaked out at moths and would start acting crazy and speaking in tongues. I shit you not. I was beginning to wonder if the trip was such a good idea. The young guy, I'm almost positive his name was Rob, had a pet shop in Calgary called "Animal House" and he gave me a pin that advertised their "Tarantula Day". I soon discovered that Rob and the Schultz's were keeping every single arthropod or herp they encountered to take back to Canada. If it moved it went into an empty yogurt cup. Anything. I'll let you infer whether or not it was Kosher for them to cross the border with their haul. But I quickly became upset that they were mass collecting with little regard to habitat. I thought a few hundred Centruroides scorpions was a little greedy. Tarantulas were flushed out of burrows and if they don't flush out and you don't successfully dig them out, they will drown in their own chamber. By trip's end I was not a happy camper. I was not a fan of Mr. Schultz then and I am not today.
This is when Stan first wrote "The Tarantula Keeper's Guide". I'll save a whole blog for my thoughts on that book later. Stay tuned. But this is the first edition and it was admittedly ground-breaking in the mid-80s. This is pre-Barron's. His original "TKG" was published by Sterling and his wife's name was not included as author. He gave me a signed copy of the brand new book once I handed him the cover price in cold cash (see pix). The cover was of their "Duchess" a large Brachypelma emilia being, of course, handled. The inscription Stan scribbled out at that scorching Texas border country rest stop is pretty much verbatim what he signs today. Ralph and I made the best of the trip, which I also recall included getting hassled by the border police. I don't know Ralph's heritage, but it's not Hispanic. However, with a Texas tan his dark complexion and thick mustache made him look like a Mexican. So we were stopped a number of times for identification as we worked our way west along the Rio Grande towards Del Rio where we would find Aphonopelma moderatum. Today this species has been over-collected by one unscrupulous individual in particular (Al Bazaar), but back then they were unknown and became the coolest tarantulas in my collection. Ralph and I only took what we wished to keep for ourselves, despite our companions doing otherwise. It seemed a Calgary pet store was going to have a huge inventory of Texas invertebrates as long as the RV wasn't searched at the border.
Today I travel the world in search of tarantula spiders. But this was the beginning. The trip with Ralph and Stan and company was my first tarantula hunt other than finding them on my grandparent's property in Arkansas. Ralph had introduced me to captive breeding and field collecting and I've made the most of the thirty-some years since.
In 2000 I left Chicagoland and didn't return until February 2013. I operated my Spider Shoppe and Living Terrarium in eastern Washington and then Nashville and then eventually took over Northwest Zoological Supply and Tarantulas.com outside of Seattle in 2007. It was great that when I returned home a little over two years ago I was able to re-connect with Ralph Henning and, his mentor counterpart for me with snakes, Scott Michaels. Here's a photo of the three of us taken last year at the All Animal Expo in Wheaton, Illinois. Ralph is the one without spectacles wearing one of my Michael Jacobi's SPIDERSHOPPE T-shirts. They're both as weird as when I met them. I'm certain they say the same of me.
FEEDING & NETFLIX
I spend a great deal of time feeding spiders. The big ones in the terrariums I care for in the spider room with some music going, usually of the progressive metal variety, but also soundtracks, "classical", Latin guitar and classic/southern rock and jambands. But when I'm feeding trays and trays of the little ones I sit at my workstation with Netflix running on my Mac. I binge watch television shows, because I've seen every good movie and new good movies are rare. Many popular shows I came to late (e.g., Breaking Bad & The Walking Dead) as I didn't even own a television for many years and never streamed online. So I had catching up to do and have watched both all the way through several times. Here are some past and present TV shows that I like in no particular order. I hope you discover something cool and new. An Idiot Abroad, Derek, Game of Thrones (can't believe the new season already ends Sunday), True Detective (season 2 starting), Bloodline, House of Cards, The Wire, SOA, Orange is the New Black (Season 3 now streaming), Hannibal, Sherlock, The Killing, Wayward Pines, The Following, The Americans, Longmire, Scrotal Recall, Skins, Inside Amy Schumer (funniest comic ever!) ... which leads me to some stand up routines like Amy, Iliza, Stanhope, Norton, Rogan, Aziz, etc...
But feeding spiders is what I do. Coffee, Blog & Email, Breakfast, Shower, Errands and then it's me feeding little bugs to bigger bugs while my Mac runs Netflix. Occasionally, I get out. But today is another feeding day as guests are coming and I'm going to mostly ignore my spider room for a week. Time for another cuppa. Have a lovely weekend, MJ
1 comment:
Thanks, I really enjoy reading your blog
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