The sun rises big and bright and wintry and the wind blusters cold off the low fields when Charlie Stine dons his waders and stomps through the last thin ice on Massey Pond like Indiana Jones in search of the Lost Ark.
On this clear sharp morning as winter ends, the Eastern Shore landscape has the spare beauty of a Rembrandt etching of Holland in winter. Charlie Stine -- Dr. Charles J. Stine in the catalog of the Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Studies -- loves this place. He's been coming to this corner of Kent County for nearly 50 years, drawn by the mysterious ways of the very elusive Eastern tiger salamander.
He found his first tiger salamanders in these parts before Massey Pond was even here, back in 1952, off Black Bottom Road at a crossroads called Golts. Massey Pond appeared serendipitously in 1957 when a road construction crew dug a pit for gravel on Route 330, then a dirt road.
"The amazing thing about the Massey Pond was that the year after they took the gravel out, it was alive with tiger salamanders and all the things they feed on," he says.
But the tiger salamander is now an endangered species in Maryland. The Heritage Conservancy Fund of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is spending $293,000 to buy 130 acres around Massey Pond to preserve the salamander's habitat here.
The tiger salamander is a charming creature with a blunt head and a wide, smirking smile. They don't seem to do much, except eat and breed, which may account for their smirk. They're amphibians with elongated bodies (7 to 13 inches) and four stout legs. They're marked with olive-yellow splotches on dark brown-black skin, more leopard-like than tigerish to this layman, but who's to argue with biologists.
These salamanders spend most of their lives underground, eating worms, grubs and similar delicacies, emerging in January to migrate to their breeding ponds. For years Massey Pond has been their major reproductive rendezvous in Maryland.
"None of the other ponds where this animal has been found have ever equaled the population," Stine says. "This has remained the one substantial continued breeding site with a good steady population," which he figures has ranged between 50 and 100 over the years.
He had known salamanders were in the neighborhood when he first visited Massey. Back in 1952, he discovered egg masses in a tiny, wet depression in a farmer's field east of the pond. Dry now, the field is patrolled on this day by a dozen turkey buzzards. But tiger salamanders from this field may have been the pioneers at Massey Pond.
"I have a theory that, with any population, whether it's humans, insects, vertebrates, that there are some members who are explorers," Stine says. "There's a Sir Edmund Hillary in every population."
So the Sir Edmund Hillary (who with the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first reached the summit of Mount Everest) of tiger salamanders found Massey Pond.
"There are small Everests ... a lot of little places and little things to discover," Stine says. "And that's true of salamanders. "A pond was created and the salamanders came. If you build it, they will come."
Stine is himself an explorer of small places, and some pretty big ones, too. He's just back from Iquitos, Peru, which is way up in the headwaters of the Amazon River. He surveyed the possibility of arranging eco-tourism to the vast nature preserves in the Amazonian jungles for the BioTrek Naturalists group he founded two years ago.
But plunging through the high-bush blueberries into Massey Pond, he looks more like Henry Jones the professor father than Indiana the adventurer son. His hair is white under his baseball cap and he wears a short, bristly, neatly trimmed white beard.
He is in his early 70s now, one of the deans of Maryland naturalists. But if he has lost a step over the years it's hard to see where.
"In the early days," he says, "I liked to come down here and sit behind those trees and just watch the pond and the life that was goin' on there. That's kind of a reflective moment.
"To me, the pond is a metaphor for life. I've seen the pond go through a lot of changes, as I have had a lot of changes. Some days it's windy. Some days it's nice. Some days there are predators. Some days there's love."
And you have attendant pleasures when you watch the pond at night, which Stine often did until the dawn. "One of the most beautiful things you see in the pond is the fairy shrimp." Thousands of the tiny, almost transparent crustaceans will follow a flashlight beam in an underwater ballet.
The wedding dance
Stine doesn't really expect to see salamanders on this day. They have returned to their burrows. They spend most of their time underground replenishing their reproductive juices. They don't hang around much after completing their rather complicated courtships, which they undertake in January.
"In a lifetime of watching this stuff, a good chunk of my lifetime," Stine says, "there have only been a few times I've seen them going through what is called the courtship ritual. The German word for it is liebesspiel, the wedding dance. I've only seen this twice with this species and a couple times with a few other of this genus.
"They get hormonally excited and they start following each other in the water," Stine says. "They make a rather loosely structured circle and they're undulating up and down. There's a lot of aesthetics here. I guess the rarity of it is enough to make it beautiful. To see animals in the passion of propagation, I've always felt it kind of put me in my place."
He has come here with friends and fellow naturalists and just plain curious visitors. This morning he's searching for the salamander larvae to show a first-time visitor. But he also likes to come alone. "You feel very privy to the secretiveness of the world around you," he says. "You get a little window into the operation of the world around you. You feel at once large and also very small.
"I've heard people talk of feeling the earth turn and being out of themselves. I experienced that only one time at Massey Pond. It was on winter's night and I looked at the sky over head and the fairy shrimp around me doing their ballet and the salamanders laying eggs and predacious diving beetles zooming around attacking salamanders. I felt I was like an atom in a very complex molecule. I felt very lucky to have that kind of life."
When he graduated in 1950 from the University of Maryland Dental School ("the first, and the best"), he came down here to the Eastern Shore and set up practice at Ridgely in Caroline County.
"The first couple of payments I got for the work that I did were animals," he recalls. "One farmer I worked on left me a skinned raccoon for my dinner. This is true."
He had grown up in Overlea when there were lots of wooded areas along Belair Road. The budding naturalist and his buddies hiked through these woods every Saturday.
But when he graduated from dental school he wanted to get away from Baltimore, and he loved roaming the woods and wetlands of the Shore. He was there about a year when he was drafted as a dentist during the Korean War.
He had tried to volunteer to serve in World War II. But he was repeatedly rejected because he had been left deaf after an attack of scarlet fever as a child. An uncommon disease now and rarely fatal, scarlet fever was one of the feared killers of children the ages before antibiotics.
He was only in the Air Force for a short time before he was ushered out on a medical discharge. When he came home he opened a practice in Northeast Baltimore, which he sold about 10 years ago. Since then he has run dental clinics at the state mental hospitals at Crownsville and Sykesville.
He's always busy as a dentist. Last month in Peru, he treated Amazonian people, and he did a lot of dentistry in Liberia 30 years ago when he was in Africa helping collect pigmy hippos for the Baltimore Zoo.
For about three years he took a part-time sabbatical from dentistry and shot films and lectured as a cinematographer for the National Audubon Society.
But most of his ecological explorations have been around and about Maryland, notably along the Gunpowder, Pocomoke and Patapsco rivers.
In May, Stine will lead BioTrek's expedition to the beaches on Delaware Bay, where thousands of horseshoe crabs come ashore for their ancient and spectacular spring spawning rituals.
Although he had been doing research, writing papers and exploring the environment for most of his life, in the early '60s, Stine decided it was time to beef up his academic credentials. He went to see Dr. Charles Southwick, head of the now-defunct department of patho-biology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.
"I said to Chuck, look, I'm about 46, pretty late to be starting this. If I go for a master's or doctorate it's going to take five or six years. I know that. I'll be one of your older students."
Southwick replied, "You're going to be that old whether you do this or not."
Stine enrolled in Animal Behavior Division of Mental Hygiene and went to school full-time from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and worked at his dental practice three nights a week and on Saturdays.
"And it was the best adventure of my life, being in my school," he says. "Every day was mind-blowing."
He earned his doctor of science degree, and as Dr. Charles J. Stine, he's taught environmental sciences at the Hopkins School of Continuing Studies for 20 years.
But at Massey Pond, his timing is a little off on this day and all he gets when he dips for young salamanders is a net that freezes immediately in the brisk wind. So he heads off for a breakfast of pancakes and sausages at a place called Twinny's in Galena.
"This place was one of the great finds of my life," he says. "I even wrote in my notebooks it was run by two guys who look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The trendy set won't come in till later."
A niche
The Eastern Shore has changed greatly since Charlie Stine started coming here 50 years or so ago. Suburban-style homes have been built across the road from Twinny's.
"Up to five years ago, this was all farmland," he says. "What is here? There's no industry. This is a commuter's place. When the [Bay] bridge was built, it was the beginning of one thing and the end of another thing."
He reflects on the tiger salamander and frogs and snakes and toads and all the other wee beasties he has seen in all these years he has been exploring this environment.
"All these species have what we ecologists call a niche," he says. "A niche is not something you can see. A niche is a functional position of an organism in its environment."
He sounds like a man who long ago found his niche in the long nights of watching the universe reflected in Massey Pond.
A BioTrek Trip
What: Charlie Stine leads a BioTrek expedition to watch horseshoe crabs breed.
When: Lecture, May 12; field trip, May 15
Where: BioTrek Naturalists Field Station, Gunpowder State Park, Harford Road; and Delaware Bay beaches
Cost: $25 members; $35 non-members
Call: 410-817-6539 or biotrek@toad.net
Pub Date: 3/29/99