Whitney Barlow Robles's "Curious Species"

Whitney Barlow Robles is an award-winning writer, historian, and curator based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. Her work has appeared in venues such as William and Mary Quarterly, New England Quarterly, and Commonplace.

Robles applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, and reported the following:

Readers who open at random to page 99 of my new book, Curious Species, will find it split in half. The page begins with the tail end of a section showing how rattlesnakes evaded the gaze of scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century; in the words of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, they were “either too dangerous in reality, or . . . objects of too great terror, to admit of being observed with sufficient attention and perseverance.” Then begins a new section on campaigns to exterminate rattlesnakes despite resistance from Native people and a small contingent of naturalists—not to mention mixed feelings, in the early modern scientific community, over extinction’s very possibility. In short, this page has two faces: one a history of science, one an environmental history. One a history of knowing, another a history of being in the world.

This broken page is actually a decent barometer of the whole—or at least half of the whole. Curious Species tells the stories of four specific animals: corals, rattlesnakes, fish, and raccoons. Animals put real limits on human efforts to master the natural world during the eighteenth century, an age of exploration, empires, and enlightenment. They bit, stung, stole, ate scientific specimens or lucrative slave-grown crops, died, decayed, and in some cases literally jumped ship. But beyond these everyday tragedies, animals were slippery and on some level not fully knowable to science. They commanded hostile environments. They communicated in tongues apart. They processed their worlds in alien fashion and bucked human desires for understanding. Rattlesnakes, as both metaphorically and literally potent animals, scared some naturalists so dearly that they declined to study them.

But the book doesn’t confine itself to the eighteenth century or to the academic study of animals. It’s also deeply concerned with ecology and biodiversity loss—and hence, with environmental history. In the case of timber rattlesnakes, systematic destruction of dens in the early modern period led to the local endangerment, and sometimes extinction, of timber rattlesnakes throughout Canada, New England, and other regions.

What a single page can’t capture is the hybrid nature of my book, whose chapters weave, snake-like, back and forth between the eighteenth century—natural history’s formative years—and the present day. Not shown on page 99 is the modern-day coda to this history of serpents: a narrative of my journey with a wildlife conservationist to see the last remaining population of rattlesnakes in New Hampshire during the fraught early days of the pandemic, to consider the many echoes between past and present. The eighteenth-century study of animals created an impasse about their nature that we inherit today.

Visit Whitney Barlow Robles's website.

--Marshal Zeringue