St. John’s Reptiles of the Northwest by Jonathan Crowe
Ark’Type, Aug.-Sept.-Oct. 2003

Reptiles of the Northwest
by Alan St. John
Lone Pine, 2002. Softcover, 272 pp. ISBN 1-55105-349-7

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.

Alan St. John’s very fine Reptiles of the Northwest manages to maintain its pocketability (and therefore its usefulness in the field) without sacrificing as much, in terms of information, as other guides. It does skimp a bit on information about the animals themselves; facts about their diet, reproduction and behaviour are condensed into a paragraph each. But this is by no means a meagre book. Instead, it is a field guide worthy of the name that focuses on where and how to find reptiles in northwestern North America and how to identify them. It provides very good subspecies data — a rare thing nowadays, when it’s fashionable to deprecate subspecies in favour of elevating them to full species or writing them off as undiagnosable variants. For example, since I breed the rascals, I was glad to learn how to determine the different subspecies of Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer). And, in addition to excellent, full-colour range maps, there is photography so beautifully staged and lit that you want to buy them as prints and frame them — including such gems as photos of tiny baby horned lizards (Phrynosoma) and of a Red-spotted Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis concinnus) swallowing a very toxic Rough-skinned Newt (Taricha granulosa).

Most of all, I enjoyed the field notes at the end of each species description, in which St. John tells a personal story about finding the animal in question in the wild (often for the purpose of photographing it for this book). These entertaining tales make Reptiles of the Northwest one of the most unique field guides I have encountered in years, and reminds us that a field guide is really about searching for, encountering and interacting with animals in the field — and this point is ably illustrated by the often-funny photos of snakes dangling off someone’s ear or lizards biting someone’s hand. Highly recommended.

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.