HM: Who are you and what do you do?
KM: My name is Kevin Messenger and I am a professor at Nanjing Forestry University in China. I grew up in Charlotte, NC and have had a love for snakes since I was about 3 years old when I was exposed to my first snake. My dad, an emergency vet, brought home an Indian python with a respiratory infection, which we rehabbed – that was the first snake I can remember, and I remember falling in love with snakes ever since.
HM: What inspired you to write the book on Chinese rat snakes in particular?
KM: Rat Snakes have always been a favorite group of mine. I had several rat snakes species growing up. The local species for me were black rats, which I still love to find. A nice, solid black, 6 foot black rat…. great animals. In my younger years, I kept a lot of captives, nowadays, not as many. But I remember rat snakes were among the top – one of the reasons was because unlike kingsnakes, I knew I could safely keep two animals in the same cage. Kingsnakes were maybe my second favorite genus, second to “Elaphe.” With regard to the Asian rat snake book in particular. I do recall having some Taiwan Beauties as a kid, and marveling at Blue Beauties and their size. And I had a Russian rat, Elaphe Schrenckii (I liked how they reminded me of eastern kings).
As for the Asian rat snake book specifically, since about 2014, I’ve been working on a book on Asian snakes. When I was awarded my position in 2017 as a professor at Nanjing Forestry University, one of the stipulations was that I publish a book. “Great, no problem!” I thought to myself, as I had already been working on a book since 2014. As my contract neared its end in October 2020, I was thinking: “hmmmm…. there’s still so much work and effort I want to put into this book, I can’t complete it by October 2020.” – So I tried to think of other species and groups that I was interested in. I love ratsnakes and there’s tons of awesome rat snakes in China, so I thought maybe I would write a book on them. And at the time my thought was “Oh, there’s only 19 species, I can knock this book out in a couple of weeks” (my thought process was based on my focus at the time). We were in the middle of a pandemic, and I didn’t have to worry about my standard duties at the university since I was stuck in the US. So I thought I could knock out a book on 19 species fairly quickly.
Man was I wrong. I’ve quickly come to learn that the first 75% of doing a book is easy, the next 20% is decent to hard work, and the last 5% is very hard. Regardless, my estimate of getting my rat snake book done by the end of October did not happen. Instead, it wasn’t until the end of February that the book was truly complete.
HM: Have you always had a particular interest in the herps in that part of the world?
KM: No. Growing up, most of my interest was in North American herps. My interest in Asian herps didn’t actually come into play until my last year of undergraduate at NC State University. I was in my final year. Dr. Heatwole (my advisor – immense in the field of herpetology) had received an email from another professor in California asking for a student to come to the mountains of central China to conduct the first ever herp survey of those mountains. I’m an Eagle Scout, camping, hiking, herping, etc, is in my blood, so I immediately applied. It was a nationwide application though.
However, by some crazy luck, I was the finalist and got the position. So, with that acceptance, I studied my ass off on Chinese language and Chinese herps. I grabbed any and all books I had that involved species from the region and began creating my own personal book, from an amalgamation of all of the resources I had. It was extremely frustrating because there were no proper herp books on the herps of China – written in English at least. The last major book was from 1935, Pope’s “The Reptiles of China” and as an undergraduate, such a book at $300+ was way out of my league. So I created my own “pamphlet” of the herps of Hubei province (the province I’d be working out of). This research is what began my interest in Asia.
HM: Was the process of writing the book difficult?
KM: Compared to doing a Master’s or a Ph.D., no, writing a book is WAY easier! I actually want to write more books and less papers due to how much easier and less stressful they are. Writing books is fun, writing a paper…. meh, sometimes it can be fun, but sometimes not. More often than not, I find myself putting my scientific papers on the back burner while I edit various pages of future books (or what I hope will be future books).
The most difficult part was the design and the formatting. My friend in China helped me translate the text and that took a long time because the scientific terms in English are not well studied in Chinese – so he had to look up a lot of the terms and consult with various Chinese herpetologists to make sure the translation was accurate. I think most people that write books usually have a design person assist with the layout, or an editor. I was doing everything myself and it was quite time consuming. Another issue was that we had to go through 3 different Chinese fonts to find one that was visually appealing, and then once we found the perfect font we realized that the English and the Chinese didn’t match very well if the English was mixed in one of the Chinese sentences.
For example, if you had a Chinese sentence and the referenced someone’s name (Heatwole for example), the English through off the spacing of the lines, so we eventually had to go in and change all of the English within the Chinese text to 10.5 font and all of the normal English sections at 12 font. It was just very tedious and time consuming, having to deal with two separate fonts and two separate font sizes, instead of just making everything the same font and the same size. And changing the Chinese fonts affected the layout of the images, and it just went on and on. English text wise, I was pretty much done around 3 months prior to the book finally getting published. I also had to produce all the range maps myself.
HM: How did you recruit help from the private sector for the book and do you think the focused hobbyist is an overlooked resource?
KM: Initially, my plan was to try and do as much of the book myself, write the whole thing myself, only use my photographs (or ones from very close friends). After I got the primary draft done (approximately 75% complete, the easy part), I looked at the finished product and realized I was massively short/ sparse on the reproduction side of the data. And that’s because the natural history of most of these species has barely been studied in China. Most herpetologists in China don’t study the natural history of the various species. They are usually too busy describing new species and still trying to determine what all they have in the country, still cataloging mountain ranges and national parks, doing bio blitzes, etc.
So, I had this massive gap in the reproduction and sometimes the diet section. I remembered Matt Most had contacted me a few years back, expressing interest in writing up a captive husbandry note on Elaphe davidi. And from what I recalled, I remembered he kept a lot of species. So I figured even though the data wouldn’t be “wild” – it would still be more informative than just having that section blank. I prefer books that are as comprehensive as possible, not only talking about the natural history of a species, but how to care for a species as well. So I contacted Matt Most and asked him if he’d be willing to contribute to some of the writing. He was quite excited about the idea and very willing to help out. His contributions I think significantly improved the book. Plus he had tons of photographs of several species I didn’t have, or at least knew of other people with said photos if he, himself, didn’t have the pictures.
HM: What’s your favorite species from the book?
KM: Hmmmm, it’s so hard to pick a favorite. King rats are among my favorite to catch in the wild. They are huge and impressive snakes. Mandarin rats are among the most beautiful I think. Ah, I know the answer to the question – and this developed as I was writing the book – Oreocryptophis porphyraceus, the bamboo rat snakes became a special interest group. I like to try and figure out puzzles and as I was collecting images and distribution maps of this complex, they intrigued me more and more as the writing continued. I’m now planning on doing a massive study on the complex in order to try and tease out the details of it.
HM: This one is for Billy but how do the king rats in their natural range compare to the ones you’ve seen in captivity?
KM: Appearance wise, about the same. I have seen a few very beautiful specimens produced in captivity, but many I see look like the wild type. Attitude wise? Mixed. Some captives are semi-chilled out, others are still quite pissy and nervous (which is how all wild specimens I’ve encountered have been).
HM: How can the hobby be better with the taxonomic mess that has become bamboo ratsnakes?
KM: Ha! Well, for one, I think it would be much better if the complex wasn’t mixed (intergrades and hybrids), because that just makes things that much more muddled. If people were to keep and breed locality specific bloodlines, I think we could learn a lot more about the complex. But when bloodlines are crossed, all bets are off with trying to learn anything “natural” about the species, or how that interaction of those bloodlines will affect pattern or color.
