Knee-Deep With Peepers: Herpetologist Bob Cook's National Park Career

Based on episode 2 of Stewardship Savvy, a podcast of the National Park Service's Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network, produced by Michaela Compo and Kristin Vinduska and released June 26, 2024. Bob Cook's words are paraphrased here.

Bob Cook describes wood frog behavior at a vernal pool on Cape Cod. Michaela Compo/NPS photo.

Bob Cook is a wildlife ecologist who spent about 37 years with the National Park Service in natural resource jobs: biologist, natural resource management specialist, ecologist. Much of that time he was at Cape Cod National Seashore, monitoring herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles. The podcast team recorded him over two days: one in conversation, and one in the field, wading through vernal pools for wood frogs and spring peepers and, after dark, out on the marsh looking for spotted salamanders.

From Queens to herpetology

Cook grew up in Queens, New York City. His first taste of nature came on family holidays of a week or two each summer: kettle-pond lakes on Long Island, then still partly rural in the 1960s, and cabin colonies along the Delaware River in Pike County, Pennsylvania, in land that later became part of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Catching fish and frogs there, he thinks, set his course.

He studied wildlife biology at SUNY ESF in Syracuse, when wildlife management mostly meant game species, and went on for a master's degree at UMass Amherst starting in 1975, drawn by its interest in urban and non-game wildlife. There a herpetologist on staff offered him a project on reports that acid rain was killing spotted salamander eggs. He said yes, and all his degree research ended up focused on reptiles and amphibians, though he stayed torn between them and birds his whole career.

Jamaica Bay and the Gateway Herp Project

Cook joined the Park Service in July 1979 at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens and Brooklyn, not for the agency but for the birding, since the refuge was one of the Northeast's top bird-watching sites. He calls those some of the best years of his life.

Within about six months, often writing between visitors at the visitor center desk, he drafted a proposal to bring locally collected native amphibians and reptiles to the refuge. The refuge's few hundred acres of upland and freshwater habitat, among the most important wildlife patches in the city, had been built artificially in the early to mid-20th century while the surrounding boroughs urbanized, so most local species could never have colonized it naturally. Establishing them would restore a more natural animal community, enrich the food web (and at least give the birds more to eat), and save local populations being wiped out by development. The Chief Scientist's office backed it fully.

That effort, the Gateway Herp Project, came to define his career: he wrote the proposal as a GS-4 park technician and was still working on it as a wildlife ecologist at Cape Cod 29 years later. He worked at Jamaica Bay and Gateway National Recreation Area until about 1996, took his first permanent job in 1984, and met his wife, Mary, at Jamaica Bay.

American Samoa

In the mid-1990s Cook became the first biologist at the new National Park of American Samoa, created by Congress less than 10 years earlier. His arrival raised the staff by half, to a superintendent, a cultural liaison and himself. The park was an office with maps and plans; it had no vehicle, not even a staple gun, and one or two computers, and email meant a long-distance modem call to Honolulu, made only twice a day because of the cost.

The park was created to protect significant undisturbed tropical forest and the two fruit bat species it supported, the Tongan flying fox and the Samoan flying fox, native to the Samoan archipelago. Cook's team surveyed rare tree snails and found new populations of endemic species on islands where they had never been recorded, work with neither birds nor herps.

Cape Cod's vernal pools

After about three years the family, with Mary also a natural resource specialist, wanted to return to the Northeast, and jobs opened at Cape Cod. There Cook developed monitoring protocols and compiled species reports for many parks across the region.

The calling survey. At night, surveyors stop at a pond and listen for five minutes, giving each species an index code:

The highest level reached during the five minutes is recorded, with a count when there are few enough to count.

Egg masses. In the pond, Cook showed how to tell the two. A spotted salamander mass is like marbles set in gelatin: take the embryos out and the jelly stays behind. A wood frog mass is like marbles glued into a ball: pick it apart and only the marbles are left. Wood frog masses are also rounder.

The chorus. Spring peepers make a high peep and a drilling trill; wood frogs have a guttural call like a duck's clucking. Only males call, to attract females to the pond and set themselves apart from rivals. His most vivid memory: one warm May night in a small Eastham pond, when peepers are too worked up to stop for anyone, he sat down in his chest waders in the water and felt the pressure waves of hundreds of calling peepers against his chest. He also recalls whole landscapes of spadefoot toads emerging in the Province Lands, and can do a convincing spadefoot toad call himself.

Lessons from a career

• Learn species. Teach yourself as much as you can. Much of a park's most important biological information comes not from formal surveys but from simply living, walking and driving there.
• Keep common species common. Beyond saving endangered species, the goal is to act early so common ones never need listing, because healthy ecosystems depend on the work that abundant species do.
• Share what you know. Park staff and local residents need to know a park's wildlife, since local people are often the ones who come to its defense.
• Why Cape Cod. The seashore packs a remarkable range of habitats into a small area: beach, ocean and salt marsh, but also dune slack wetlands, vernal ponds, stunted 15-foot scrub oak on the scarp, and dry kettle holes in the oak forests between Long Nook Road and Old Dew Line Road, all within a couple of hours' walk if you know the way.

Cook finds two kinds of religious experience: being alone in nature, and a Rolling Stones concert, of which he has attended about 16 or 17. Retired, he still works on reports and research, dividing his time between Cape Cod and Alaska, where his wife works.

Sources

• National Park Service, Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network, "Stewardship Savvy Ep. 02: Knee-deep with peepers, pools, & The Rolling Stones": https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/stewardship-savvy-ep-02-knee-deep-with-peepers-pools-and-the-rolling-stones.htm
• Podcast: https://home.nps.gov/im/ncbn/stewardship-savvy.htm
• The page spells the co-producer's name both "Kristin" and "Kristen" Vinduska; this page uses the episode credit's spelling.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.