The ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario by Jonathan Crowe
The OHS News 92 (July 2002)

The ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario
by Ross D. MacCullough
McClelland & Stewart, 2002. Softcover, 168 pp. ISBN 0-7710-7651-7

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.

It’s important to remember that this is a field guide, focused on the identification of wildlife in the field, and as such is not terribly in-depth — after all, it’s supposed to fit in your pocket! Each species is limited to a page of description and a page of photographs, a format which, for the most part, works rather well. Information is basic (identification, habitat, diet, reproduction), concise and, for the most part, accurate.

But brevity can be risky, and errors can sometimes creep in. Describing Butler’s Garter Snakes as “more slender” than Common Garter Snakes (p. 130) is, in my experience, a mistake; and the description of the Fowler’s Toad’s call as simply “shorter” than that of the American Toad (p. 68) is not correct either. Nor is there any distinction between the Eastern and Red-sided subspecies of the Common Garter; descriptions are at the species level, and different subspecies are not always distinguished.

Common names definitely suffer from the focus on the species level, as “Eastern Racer” and “Eastern Ratsnake” are used, rather than the more commonly used subspecies names of “Blue Racer” and “Black Rat Snake”. Common names generally follow the names set out in SSAR’s Scientific and Standard English Names of Amphibians and Reptiles of North America North of Mexico (2000), rather than the more familiar and widely used names found in the controversial competing list put out by Joe Collins’s Centre for North American Herpetology.

In spite of the real space limitations, I would have liked to have seen descriptions of frog and toad calls and of amphibian eggs, which are dealt with only occasionally (larvae and tadpoles are well represented in the photographs), because in my experience eggs and calls are encountered often enough that having an answer in a field guide would have been a real help.

Those wanting to learn more about our native herpetofauna would do well to consult the excellent Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region by James H. Harding (1997). But, since that book is too large to tuck into your bag or pocket, grab this little book instead if you’re heading out into the field and need to know what it is you’ve just found.

Note: This article has not been updated since its first publication. As a result, some of the facts referred to in the text may now be out of date.