by By Jon Furman
University Press of New England, 2007
Biology, History, and the Fate of an Endangered Species
Every once in a while, a book comes along that defies categorization. Such is the wonderful, slithering conundrum that author Jon Furman poses for booksellers with his Timber Rattlesnakes in Vermont & New York.
Its title and 208 extensively footnoted pages argue for placement on the shelf with other nature guides. But there are easily a half-dozen reasons Furman’s book deserves a much wider readership, not the least of which is its stunning cover photo of a yellow-morph timber rattler, its fierce glare through yellow-slitted eyes striking us – as it were – with fear, fascination, and repulsion.
This is anything but a guidebook in the conventional sense, though Furman has documented in remarkable detail the lives and habits of a shy creature you may never see. We learn how timber rattlers mate, hunt (using smell and heat with scary efficiency), bite, and “envenomate,” how long they live (up to 30 years), and how big they can grow (a fat 4–5 feet long).
Furman’s extensive research unveils many surprising facts: that the rattlesnakes migrate back and forth from long-established communal hibernation dens to favored summer basking knolls and shelter rocks, and that at the northern edge of their range they don’t begin reproducing until around 10 years of age.
Yet in the most fundamental way, Furman has written an anti-guide book: he goes out of his way not to reveal where timber rattlers can be found, to protect an endangered species from those who would hunt them illegally or capture them for sale.
What Furman has crafted – it took him five years of extensive research, interviews, field work, writing, and rewriting – is nothing less than a remarkable snake stew, a blend of history book, field trip, old-fashioned yarn, ecological and biological study, mythology, and sociological treatise on the evolution of our attitudes toward Crotalus horridus, as it’s known in the Latin taxonomy.
Furman takes readers on many interesting side trips. His detailed description of how the rattlers’ venom works and stories of those who have been bitten are spellbinding in a horrible way.
Equally riveting are his tales of the literally snake-bit community of rattler experts, ranging from enlightened natural biologists and preservationists to brazen bounty hunters. From 1895 through 1971, timber rattlers in Rutland County, Vermont, and Essex, Warren, and Washington Counties, New York, were decimated by a small band of intrepid bounty hunters whose stories and portrayals provide one of the most interesting themes in his book – and no small dose of irony. On the one hand, folks like New York’s Art Moore – Furman says he was the most prolific bounty hunter ever, with 15,000 dead rattlers to his name – helped to virtually wipe out the species. On the other, Moore and kindred spirits like the legendary Bill Galick of Rutland County were prodigious naturalists who gained an encyclopedic knowledge of their prey and, in some cases, a curious affection for them, despite many sweat-inducing tales of close calls and actual bites. (There are two nauseating photos of what a snake-bitten hand looks like.)
In telling their tales and feats, Furman dishes up a delightful slice of the Northeast’s vanished past and captures the shifting cultural views of these venomous creatures over the span of a century, from pest to an animal worthy of preservation. In a fine twist, Furman relates how Bill Galick’s property, with its excellent snake habitat, ended up being preserved in 1989 by The Nature Conservancy, thanks to the efforts of Mark DesMeules, one of a small band of enlightened and foresighted individuals whose snake advocacy receives long-overdue recognition in the pages.
As Furman emphasizes and anecdotally documents over and over again, timber rattlers are nonaggressive, shy creatures designed to kill mice and other rodents, not large humans. When human deaths do occur, it is often an allergic reaction at play combined with human folly, such as using rattlers in religious rituals.
Furman’s book greatly advances our knowledge of these misunderstood creatures, who now inhabit only a small physical realm among us yet live large in our minds and fears.
“My attitude toward these beautiful and potentially dangerous reptiles, which have long held their place in the forests of America, is that we should understand them, respect them, and leave them alone,” he concludes in the book, calling them “symbols of our rapidly vanishing wilderness.”
A version of this review appeared previously in The Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus.