Book Review: America's Snake - The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake

The rattlesnake is the herpetological icon of the Old West, the villain of cowboy yarns and the buzzing soundtrack of western movies.  Not all rattlesnakes, however, are creatures of the plains and deserts.  It would surprise many people to know that rattlesnakes can also be found in the surprisingly less-expected states of the north and east, such as Massachusetts and New York.  This part of the country is the realm of the timber rattlesnake - though for how much longer remains to be seen.

America's Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake, by nature writer Ted Levin, tells the story of this once-iconic, now largely forgotten snake.   This is the rattlesnake species that the English settlers of North America first met, and it certainly made an impression on them.  Decades after arrival, their descendants were putting the snake on a flag with the words "Don't Tread On Me," using it as a symbol of defiance against the British crown, while Benjamin Franklin waxed poetically about the snake's virtues.  That patriotic fervor, of course, doesn't change the fact that the rattlesnake is a venomous snake, a group of animals people typically show little appreciation for.  The snake has been subject to intense persecution, and its numbers are dropping across much of its range.

The book explores the cultural and natural history of the snake (similar to Jack Davis's The Bald Eagle), focusing on efforts to better understand and conserve the species in the face of many threats - habitat loss, overcollection, and persecution.  Like Davis's eagle book, this can get a little chaotic and jumbled at times, and there are parts where it reads more like a bunch of anecdotes and facts that are trying, and not quite succeeding, to weave themselves into a fluid narrative (and at times a little repetitive).  The book is more focused on the snake's haunts in the northeast and Midatlantic, where it maintains a toehold (or as much of a toehold as an animal can have when it lacks feet) and opposed to the southern parts of its range, so it's also not completely comprehensive in its view of the snake.

That said, it's hard to write a bad book with such a fascinating cast of characters - human and animal - and Levin's book does the snake justice.   The author's enthusiasm for the subject is obvious, and there is a tremendous amount of fascinating info on this snake, which many people might not have been aware of previous.  For over 200 years the bald eagle has been our nation's bird, and the bison was relatively recently honored as our national mammal.  Perhaps there's room on the pedestal for a national reptile?  I can think of no species which would have a better claim.

America's Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake at Amazon.com