Field Notes

Short observations.
No schedule.

These are brief notes from work in progress, written mostly for colleagues. They are not peer-reviewed and are not positions of the practice. If a note matures into a position, it migrates to the Dossier.

The gasket is the enclosure

On a commissioning walkthrough last month, a new ten-bank elapid wall passed every spec on the drawings and failed at the gaskets. The fabricator had substituted a nitrile of nominally identical Shore rating; after three weeks under hot-room thermal cycling, compression set had opened the inner seam to 2.1 mm at the midline on three of ten doors. The drawings said EPDM for a reason. We now specify gasket material and durometer on the door elevation itself, not in the materials schedule, where substitutions are easier to slip past review.

On being wrong about a burrow

A call last spring on a Crotalus scutulatus den on pasture edge: the landowner had identified the entrance and wanted the den translocated in advance of a fence line. We told him the hole he was pointing at was a ground-squirrel midden, not an overwintering site, and that the snakes were using the rock pile sixty meters east. We were right about the rock pile. We were wrong that the midden was unused — a subadult came up from it three days into the work. Lesson: in shared-use terrain, "primary" and "secondary" are inventions of our surveys, not commitments the animals have made.

Twelve minutes, seven lines

A physician we work with pushed back on the length of our first-twelve-minutes checklist — she wanted it expanded. We declined, and she now agrees. Under stress, staff read the first line and the last line. Anything in the middle is decoration. The discipline of the card is what it leaves out: no causation theory, no antivenom dosing, no species lookup. Those live on the wall behind it. The card answers only the question "what do I do in the next minute."

Withdrawing

Declined continuation on a standard-of-care matter after a second document production revealed facts inconsistent with the theory we had been asked to support. The retaining party was gracious about it; another expert was found within a week. We note this publicly because the shape of a referral practice depends on being seen to withdraw when withdrawal is correct, and not only on being seen to accept.

Ambush posture as enclosure feedback

A Bitis gabonica in a three-year-old display had been holding a flat-coiled ambush posture against the front glass for most of every day. The curator read it as stress; we read it as a thermal gradient complaint. Re-probing the enclosure found the warm end two degrees under target and the cool end three degrees over, compressing the usable gradient. A single basking lamp relocation restored the gradient and the animal moved off the glass within a week. The animal was telling the room what was wrong; nobody had been reading the posture as data.

The call we did not take

A film unit in a neighboring state reached out through two intermediaries for on-set safety coverage on a picture involving a live Naja. The timeline was eight working days; the script revisions were not complete; the second-unit director had never worked with venomous animals. We declined through the chain we were reached through. The production was able to source another consultant. We did not do the job poorly — we did not do the job.