Henry Sheldon Fitch

Henry Sheldon Fitch (born December 25, 1909) is a U.S. herpetologist.

He was born in Utica, New York. When he was one year old, the family moved to Medford in the Rogue Valley in Oregon. Growing up on his father's 116 acre (0.5 km²) ranch, he had a keen interest in all the reptiles he could find already as a child. He retells that he particularly liked snakes, for "the real bonus was in seeing horrified adults scatter."

In 1926 he enrolled at the University of Oregon, but switched for graduate work to the UC Berkeley, where he got an M.A. in 1933 and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1937. From 1938 to 1947 he worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) as a field biologist in the department for pest control studying rodents such as squirrels, gophers, or kangaroo rats.

During World War II, he served from 1941 to 1945 in the Medical Corps as an Army pharmacist. He was stationed in the UK and later in France and finally in Germany. In 1946 he married Virginia Ruby Preston, with whom he would have three children. After some difficulties in getting back his old job at the USFWS he left them in 1948 and accepted a position as superintendent of the University of Kansas Natural History Reservation and instructor of zoology, where he could again pursue his studies of snakes and lizards. He became assistant professor in 1949 and full professor in 1958.

From 1965 on, he did extensive field work in Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. In 1976, he took up field work in Nicaragua and succeeded in getting a five-year-plan for "ctenosaura" conservation instituted in the 1980s. He retired in 1980, but as of 2006, he was still an active herpetologist, collecting snakes and publishing papers.

References

*Stewart, M.M; Echelle, A.F.; Fitch, H.S.: "Historical Perspective: Henry S. Fitch", in "Copeia", Vol. 2000, No. 3, pp. 891 – 900. Interview with Henry S. Fitch, conducted on September 6, 1998 by his daughter Alice Fitch Echelle and her family.