Cal DeWitt considers his childhood normal — that is, except for the zoo he kept in his backyard. “I did most everything that was normal,” DeWitt said. “But I never got into any fights because the other boys knew I had snakes. They did not dare tangle with me.”
At the age of three years old, DeWitt was given a turtle as a pet. By the time he graduated high school, he had amassed an entire collection of animals in his backyard. At its height, sometime during the 1950s, DeWitt owned two alligators, a lizard, an assortment of frogs, toads, salamanders, and fish, 39 parakeets, a cockatiel that lived in the kitchen, and all the species of turtles and snakes native to his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan (except for a live rattlesnake — he had a dead one that was preserved in alcohol). “My backyard zoo just got bigger and bigger,” DeWitt said, becoming a member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists at the age of 19. “People actually came over on Sunday afternoons to show their children my zoo.”
Through this hobby, DeWitt taught himself how to perform surgery on birds, removing cancerous growths off his own birds and other neighborhood pets. Eventually, word got around to the president of the State Veterinarian Society who controls veterinary medicine in Michigan. Instead of cracking down on DeWitt for practicing veterinary medicine without a license, he was granted permission to continue to perform surgery on birds as no other veterinarian in the state was trained to. The only caveats were that DeWitt couldn’t charge anything and he couldn’t advertise his services.
On top of bird surgery, DeWitt invented an automatic system for regulating water levels for his various fish tanks in his basement aquarium. “I had big jars of water on the sides of the tanks, and when the water level started to go down, they automatically connected to keep the same level. Anyway, it was a lot of glasswork and hydraulics,” DeWitt said. After learning about the New York Aquarium’s water leveling system through a publication, DeWitt thought his own system worked better and wrote to the director of the aquarium detailing his system and how to run it. Nine months later, DeWitt received a letter from the director saying they had adopted his system. “I didn’t know how important that was. I mean, I was excited about it, but no one really knew about it,” he said.
DeWitt’s friends and family were sure that he was going to go to school to become a veterinarian, but he had another plan for himself. Bird surgery and inventing water tank regulation systems were, of course, just casual hobbies. DeWitt had his sights set for academia, motivated by the curiosity and inspiration he would instill in the neighbors and friends who visited his backyard zoo.
“So, that’s where my teaching began, in my backyard zoo,” DeWitt said. “People would wonder, ‘Why do you keep these reptiles? Aren’t they dangerous? What are they good for?’ Well, what happened was I learned how to teach, but I hadn’t been instructed in how to teach. So, I taught how to behold things. That’s what I did as a kid — spent long hours watching different animals.”
To kick off his career in education, DeWitt began teaching a herpetology program at the Grand Rapids Museum at the age of 16. Between his pets and the books he read, more specifically a non-circulating book from his local library titled “The Herpetology of Michigan,” he was more than qualified to share his love of creeping animals1 with the public.
DeWitt attended Calvin College in his hometown which allowed him to keep his zoo all through his undergraduate career. He enrolled in as many biology courses as he could and was soon spotted by the chairman of the biology department who gave DeWitt a lab of his own to study feather development in parakeets. By the time he was a senior, DeWitt was a teaching assistant for microbiology and embryology courses, using the same techniques to teach his friends and neighbors about his backyard zoo. “The key was to excite them and make them really interested so they would not only ask questions, but seek answers on their own,” he said.
Before starting graduate school at the University of Michigan, DeWitt married fellow biology student, Ruth DeWitt, who didn’t bat an eye at his love for reptiles, amphibians, and the like. Supported by Ruth’s fellowship, the young married couple began on their master’s degrees with DeWitt taking classes in cell physiology, molecular biology, neuromuscular basis of animal behavior, neurophysiology, environmental physiology, and biometrics. The next year, DeWitt received a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, awarded to him through his backyard zoo experience. His local congressman, Gerald Ford, who later became the 38th president of the United States, wrote DeWitt a letter of congratulations on his achievement.
DeWitt continued with his studies and pursued his PhD after being approached by William Dawson, a University of Michigan physiologist. “It was a great honor,” he said. “It was like Einstein asking you if you’d like to work on physics with him.” DeWitt worked as a lead teaching fellow and conducted research on the environmental physiology of the desert iguana. In order to obtain the information he would need, DeWitt created his own instruments that would measure the hypothalamus of a desert iguana moving along the desert surface. Through this method, he discovered the iguana’s head temperature was lower than their body temperature and that they could purposely cool their head by panting. DeWitt wrote a paper on his findings and submitted it to the editor of “Psychological Zoology,” now called “Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches.” He heard back soon after with word that the journal would not only publish his paper, but publish it without change. Today, the paper is tied for 25th most published in the journal’s 90-year history.
Nearing the end of his PhD, DeWitt was invited to interview with a top-level committee of professors at a private club in Detroit. “The odd thing was that it wasn’t open to the public,” he said. “It was a really long conversation, and two weeks later, I got a call asking me to lunch. At the end of the lunch, they asked if I would like to become an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. I hadn’t even applied! I couldn’t believe it.”
DeWitt graduated with his PhD within the year, and received a commencement address from Lyndon B. Johnson, the current president of the United States at that time. Afterwards, he started his assistant professorship and the beginning of his long career in academia. “I just did what I loved to do,” he said, “and it was about then that I started thinking about what my dad told me. My dad was a painter and decorator, and he told me to do whatever I wanted with my life, but only do what I loved and do it so well that someone will eventually pay me for it. So, my whole life has been like that.”
After a few years and a few kids, DeWitt wanted to take a sabbatical in New Zealand to study the tuatara, an ancient reptile that lives in the Cook Strait between the north and south island. However, Warren Porter, a zoology professor at UW–Madison, convinced DeWitt to take his sabbatical in Madison instead. DeWitt taught seven seminars during his time in Wisconsin and became very much acquainted with the faculty, to which he decided to make the switch from wolverine to badger and join the Nelson Institute, back then called the Institute for Environmental Studies.
The year was 1970 and the early days of the Nelson Institute were motivated by Senator Gaylord Nelson’s emphasis on connecting disciplines around environmental issues. As such, DeWitt was hired as a professor without a department, the only one in the entire university. “My assignment, directly from the chancellor, was to address the problem of the fragmentation of the disciplines,” he said, and went to work teaching classes on a variety of subjects.
During this time, DeWitt and Ruth were living in graduate student housing, but knew they wanted to buy their own land, preferably near a marsh. DeWitt had spent enough time in desert climates studying iguanas — it was time to branch out and become more acquainted with wetland ecosystems. The couple bought a house and some land south of Lake Waubesa near Oregon, Wisconsin, today known as the Waubesa Wetlands State Natural Area, all thanks to DeWitt’s work over the years.
Now working in Science Hall, DeWitt set forth making the space his own, figuring out ways to get his own laboratory and equipment. After a few years of teaching at UW–Madison and living on the wetlands, DeWitt wanted to extend his classroom to the outdoors, specifically his own backyard. He worked the logistics out with the university by classifying his home as a part of the university, not by sale, but by arrangement, and began to teach his classes out on the marsh. His students would spend the first few weeks exploring the wetlands and figuring out what potential research projects they would want to work on, eventually submitting a research proposal which would be reviewed by DeWitt who acted as a consultant.
“They conducted research and developed their findings into a professional paper. Then I gathered all the neighbors, the town chairman, and a couple of other interested people from the Madison area, and we’d put a screen in the house and have a seminar for everyone. We did that for 30 years, and the neighbors fell in love with the Waubesa Wetlands. They owned it, and they began giving it away. And now it’s a thousand acres,” DeWitt said.
Recently, DeWitt’s 20-year-old grandson, Ben, created a documentary about the wetlands, featured at the Nelson Institute’s Tales from Planet Earth film series. “He spent a lot of his childhood here. Ruth would take him out to the creek and look for fish and invertebrates.” DeWitt said. The film, “Waubesa Wetlands: An Invitation to Wonder” explores the uniqueness of Wisconsin’s wetland habitats along with the history of the one DeWitt worked to preserve.
“This has kind of become a famous place, but no one can really know because it’s too awesome for that. There’s 6,000 years of history here,” DeWitt said. “The area’s worth millions, and it hardly cost us a dime.”
1 The word herpetology comes from the Greek word herpeton, meaning “creeping animal.”