William Lloyd Pratt Jr.

Much of what and who I am came from my big bro, Will.

We wandered the country as children in the back of our family station wagon, turning over rocks and logs and catching whatever lived under them.

We surreptitiously removed Mom’s pillowcases from the linen closet to serve as snake bags

My parents had the patience of a rock to tolerate the bags and boxes of live critters, fossils, minerals and bits of plants we took back home to Texas.

As I write this I have here on my desk a small Coues Deer antler. Inscribed on it in indelible India ink, in my brothers fine and precise hand is the place and date of its collection in the Chisos Basin in the spring of 1954. I was 9, he was 11.

He even then was the scientist, and recorded the proper data to place this artifact in time and space.

Every time I handle it or even think of it I am transported back to that magic trip we took with the whole family to the nearly new Big Bend National Park.

Will and I roamed as far as allowed, lost in the natural riches of this new wonderland.

It was such a huge and magnificent place, and so full of new life forms for us that the trip was magic.

The Big Bend became a special place for our family. Will did his master’s thesis there, my fiancé and I canoed many of the canyons of the Rio Grande, and our family even held a reunion there.

We moved briefly to Oklahoma, then on the Pennsylvania, and two years later returned to Texas.

It was a hard thing to do as kids, leaving all that was familiar behind. But our shared love of each other and the natural world eased the sting, gave us lots of new critters to meet and get to know, and drew us even closer together.

And those early days of wandering the country learning what besides humans lived there shaped both his life and mine.

We both became biologists.

He earned a double doctorate in Botany and Malacology; the study of mollusks. He specialized in desert snails and moved the science forward by describing and naming two new species of Snail; one for his fiancé, then wife, Suzy.

His scholarship was careful, thorough and tight.

In his capacity as Curator of Natural Science at UNLV he ventured into many fields and did notable work on such diverse things as how ants can be used to discover fossils or archaeological deposits to the territorial movements and needs of the endangered Desert Tortoise.

He was an inveterate birder, and his life list was meticulously tended. He knew the field marks and songs of nearly every bird in North America and many in Mexico and elsewhere.

From nearly childhood Will kept field notes on all of his wanderings. As he matured, they became more and more precise; a record of his life as a biologist.

That collection of carefully recorded notes will help keep his memory alive.

In my last conversation with him, only a few days ago, he corrected my faulty memory of a very early trip on which I had caught a rare lizard. He was so elated that he ran back to our family camp yelling, “Mom, dad… Ricky…” over and over breathlessly, which served to thoroughly frighten my mother. She thought I had been bitten by a snake or fallen off a mountain.

That became a family story, often told.

For all his precocious performance in science, his social skills were slow to develop.

It was not until he and Suzy fell in love that he became a

fully fledged person.

She nurtured that side of him, and in her company he became an attentive husband, a fine father with the birth of Taylor, and a doting grandfather when Abbey came along.

It was a joy to watch that part of his development.

So my big bro is gone, and with him a big part of who and what I am. It is hard to accept that we will never again speak or trade stories. But his memory is strong within me. I loved him, deeply, and will miss him sorely.

A graveside service for William will be held Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 1:00 PM at King David Memorial Cemetery, 2697 E Eldorado Ln, Las Vegas, Nevada 89120. A burial will occur at King David Memorial Chapel & Cemetery, 2697 E Eldorado Ln, Las Vegas, Nevada 89120.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.kingdavidlv.com for the Pratt family.