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‘The More You Know, The Less You Fear’

Near the southwest corner of Schreeder Pond at Chatfield Hollow State Park is the Oak Lodge Nature Center, housed in a small clapboard cabin with a fieldstone chimney. Visitors to the park will often poke their heads through its open doorway, wondering what’s inside and whether they’re welcome to enter. Naturalist Wray Williams will happily assure them that they are.

Very welcome, in fact.

Built in 1937 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the lodge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. Today, glass tanks placed around the room are inhabited by native and non-native snakes, spiders, fish, and even an axolotl (a carnivorous Mexican salamander) or two. A black bear pelt, its head frozen mid-roar, hangs on a wall while a wild turkey taxidermy spies on visitors from a wooden beam well above their heads.

At one end of the room, on a Saturday afternoon in late July, was a tabletop display of intricately constructed fairy houses. The miniature village, constructed by Hamden musician Steve Rodgers, is constructed of moss, twigs, dried flowers, shells, bark and, forming a sort of domed roof, a gray, papery (and thankfully vacant) bald-faced hornets’ nest. Shimmering stained-glass windows are made from sea glass. Found human-made objects like a model brass diving mask lend a touch of whimsy. In mid-August, Rodgers paid a visit to the Nature Center to give a talk about constructing these fanciful dwellings from materials found in nature. His talk was punctuated by downpours, which led families to race inside from their reunions and picnics. They were surprised to see Rodgers, who provided the children with shells, sea glass, and other natural stuff he’d collected so they could construct their own fairy habitats at home.

The fairy village is just one example of the ways in which Williams seeks to energize the Nature Center—and the public—with programs that inform, challenge, and delight. Retired in 2020 after 30 years working for the city of New Haven, Williams learned from a former colleague about an opening for a part-time naturalist at Chatfield Hollow. He applied, was offered the job, and started this spring. He plans to stretch his limited approved hours into October. He hopes to be rehired for the seasonal position again in 2024 at the 412-acre Chatfield Hollow State Park, located at 381 CT-80, Killingworth, adjacent to Cockaponset State Forest.

Varied Interests, Diverse Programming

For now, Williams is testing out programs to see where the public’s interests lie. His own personal interests are varied. Hobbies include “cartoons, comics, and cutlery,” he likes to say. By cutlery, he means swords of all types. He also is fond of spiders and has owned a few. Some, like Jonah, a Chilean rose hair tarantula, currently a resident at the Nature Center, have names related to the Spider-Man comics. In a tank beside Jonah is his red-leg tarantula named “Carnom,” a melding of “carnage” and “venom.” As a self-described foodie, Williams loves to cook and bake. He’s published a cookbook containing 32 flavors of jello and pudding shots and has “expanded into ice cream and sherbets.” And he’s written a number of children’s stories that are as yet unpublished.

Williams is also a paranormal investigator. Now that he’s installed in Killingworth, he’s developed a particular interest in Goody Wee and her daughter, Betty Wee, who were said to be witches who lived in and around Chatfield Hollow. According to a letter written in the late 18th century by Martin Lord, a Killingworth representative in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the two women were believed to inhabit their neighbors’ cows’ milk and turn it sour, among other acts of mischief. There once was an area in the woods known as Goody Wee’s Crotch; today, they’re remembered by the park’s Witches Trail, which traverses a half-mile of woodland.

In a talk held at the Nature Center in August, fellow paranormal investigator Joe Franke promised a discussion of the witches of Chatfield Hollow as well as Hell Hollow Road in Voluntown and the "cursed village” of Dudleytown in Cornwall. The program was also to include “many other stories of the paranormal taken from his long history of working with Ed and Lorraine Warren of Monroe, known for the investigations behind the films The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror." Not only was the talk fully subscribed in advance, but Williams was fielding pleas from people who hoped to somehow get in, an unlikely prospect, given the small size of the Nature Center.

Tackling Unfounded Fears

As a young child, Williams thought he might like to be a veterinarian. Then, he considered teaching. Being a park ranger or naturalist, he figures, is the perfect combination of both.

“[T]he animals here—I’m taking care of them, and I’m also teaching people about them,” he explains. “Like snakes and spiders—so many people are afraid of them. I’m trying to help them understand and…appreciate them.

“Fear is not knowing,” he says. “The more you know, the less you fear.”

To counter widespread fears of spiders, Williams likes to take Jonah out of his tank and show him off. One day, a little girl named Popsy Kooperkamp-Lopez, whose family visits Killingworth every summer from Brooklyn, wasn’t sure she was interested in getting acquainted with the tarantula. This wasn’t surprising: taking his legs into consideration, Jonah was about the size of her father’s palm.

“He’s smaller than I am,” Wray assured her. “He’s more afraid of me than I would be of him. He doesn’t want me to squish him.”

Williams produced a plastic box shaped like a slice of bread and adorned with the cheerful, multicolored spots of the Wonderbread logo. What was inside was far less mundane than a slice of white bread: a somewhat intimidating heap of furry, notched legs, jaws, and whatever else. Having explained that these were the products of Jonah’s molting, Williams pointed out fangs, which molt, too, and turn black when they dry out. Was Popsy interested in touching them? She wasn’t. But Williams assured her that the body parts were not alive and couldn’t possibly hurt her. And besides, they were soft and fuzzy. She reached out a tenuous hand.

Yes, they were soft and fuzzy. And they didn’t hurt her.

For some of us, snakes and spiders are the stuff of nightmares. But Williams calls this “unfounded fear: you have no idea why you’re afraid of it.” For Williams, learning and understanding creatures are the antidotes to fearing them. After all, for the person who doesn’t know anything about snakes, every snake is terrifying. But once someone knows which should be avoided—and learns to recognize them—they can also learn how to avoid them. Williams provides practical advice as well. He advises hiking in wooded areas with a stick, which can be used to move a snake out of one’s path.

He also has an “Appendage Theory”: “People who are afraid of snakes are often okay with spiders and vice versa,” he explains. “It’s the appendages: one’s got too many, the other, not enough.”

Spiders have more appendages than most people know about. Eight of them are legs. In front are a couple of pedipalps, which the spider uses to maneuver prey. Four to six in the back are spinnerets, organs that produce the silk that many—but by no means all—spiders weave into webs.

“There are around 550 species of spider in Connecticut,” says Williams. None of them are tarantulas. Most are “so small, they’re negligible. 47 [species] you can actually see.”

As it happens, Jonah is among the mellowest of tarantulas. Others, such as the cobalt blue tarantula, native to Myanmar and Thailand, are known to be defensive and aggressive, but Jonah doesn’t seem to mind being scooped out of his tank and held in Williams’s palm. The fuzziest parts of him appear golden in the sunlight that filters through the window; his legs seem almost to drape over Williams’s hand, reminiscent of the way a human might lounge in a hammock. But while Williams’s object is to make creatures like Jonah less intimidating, he’s not above holding him just inches from his face and grinning maniacally for a photo. Poppy senses the fun in it and tentatively reaches her finger out to touch the soft fur. Soon, Jonah is perched on Williams’s head. Williams is wearing a mischievous smile.

A Second Home

When Wray Williams was six or so, his grandmother met a naturalist from New Haven’s West Rock Nature Center (WRNC) at church and told him about her grandson’s fondness for animals. Soon after, the place became something of a second home for Williams.

It was “a neat little oasis in the city,” Williams remembers. “Growing up at the WRNC, I didn’t want to go home. Not that I didn’t have a good home life, but I loved being there.”

At that time, the WRNC was the largest wildlife rehabilitation facility in the state, according to Williams.

“We had three different areas: a mammal area, birds, and reptiles,” he explains. Some animals’ stay was temporary; others could not be rehabilitated and sent back into the wild, so their stay was more permanent. Some of the birds that occupied the WRNC at one time or another were “owls, hawks, turkeys, pheasant, geese, ducks, songbirds, [and] crows,” Williams remembers. As for mammals, there were “raccoon, skunk, fox, squirrels, rabbits, woodchuck, bobcat, deer, coyote, [and] mountain lion.

“I’ve dealt with most mammals of Connecticut,” he says, “with the exception of black bear, moose, and fisher.”

Williams became an official volunteer of the WRNC at the age of 11. At 18, he was hired part-time as zookeeper, then progressed to full-time as Assistant Park Ranger and then Park Ranger. Later, he transferred to the Trowbridge Environmental Center in New Haven’s East Rock Park, where he created and managed its Eco Junior day camp for children between the ages of 8 and 11. Each camp session ran for two weeks and there were three per summer. Because many parents would sign their children up for all three sessions, he couldn’t simply rely on the same activities. He had to be creative.

The second year the Eco Junior camp was offered, it filled up in one day, he recalls.

Williams’s goal was for campers to experience the same love of nature that he had as a child. And he understood firsthand how important that was for city kids.

“It’s different for them to be out in nature,” he explains. “They have apprehensions.” Many of the campers had seen the Friday the 13th movies and would tell him with trepidation that Jason, the antagonist, “lives in the woods.”

“You do understand it’s a movie?” he’d ask them. Then he’d explain that the scary sound they were hearing was a wood frog.

It’s important for kids to see “black and brown faces in America’s wild places, people of color in different jobs in nature,” like “rock climbers, team builders, falconers,” he says.

And getting outside is therapeutic.

“Walking through a meadow barefoot is grounding,” he continues. “It helps the body get in tune with nature.” And nature, he says, is “the great equalizer.”

Spending time outdoors is also an antidote to many kids’ tendencies to play video games all day.

“Kids need to get outside more, touch all those trees,” he says. “Different types of trees feel different.

“Just like people, we are all the same,” he says. “We just have different coatings.”

To find out about upcoming events at Chatfield Hollow, visit www.facebook.com/friendsofchatfieldhollow.