(HOST)
Recently, commentator Ted Levin met a young man who has taken unusual steps to protect one of Vermont’s most reclusive and endangered animals – one that’s just now emerging from it’s winter dens.
(LEVIN) It was the second weekend in March and I was in Sweetwater, Texas. To get there, I drove west from Dallas on Route 20, through 245 miles of plains and hills of scrubby brush. West of Abilene, the landscape became more barren. Short grass hugged the ground, waiting for rain, which sometimes arrives in spring as a fusillade of hail. Each year, at best, twenty-to-twenty-five inches of precipitation falls on Sweetwater, where it’s always windy. When it doesn’t rain it’s dusty. Sweetwater is the heart of tornado country.
Buffalo are long gone from West Texas, like the nomadic Indians, who subsisted on them. Cougar and black bear are reduced to rumors, and the legendary prairie dog town which once covered more than 100,000 miles of West Texas has been all but eradicated. What’s left has thorns – mesquite, prickly pear, acacia – or fangs. Western diamond-backed rattlesnakes are still common around Sweetwater. But, for how long, is speculative.
For forty-nine years, during the second weekend in March, the Sweetwater Jaycees have sponsored the world’s largest Rattlesnake Roundup, an event that attracts more than 30,000 tourists, who witness (and participate in) the killing of thousands of rattlesnakes for meat, skin, venom, and entertainment.
A huge money maker for the Jaycees, the Roundup features a Miss Snake Charmer Pageant, a parade, a barbeque cook-off, a snake-meat eating contest, a flea market and vendors who sell rattlesnake-skin cell phone holders, billfolds, i-pod cases, head bands, belts, rattle or fang earrings, necklaces, and so on.
I was pretty depressed by the whole thing, realizing that if Vermont held a Roundup timber rattlesnakes would be gone in a few hours, particularly if hunters could gas dens (as they do in Texas), a practice that results in a Biblical-style exodus of petrol-contaminated serpents.
Then, by the milking and skinning pits, I met Paul Jardine of Fair Haven, a thirty-four-year-old Marine medic on leave from Iraq. A 1991 graduate of Fair Haven Union High School, Jardine saw his first Vermont timber rattlesnake as it crossed a dirt road along the Poultney River in 1997. He stopped his car and watched in awe. Now, when he’s at home, Jardine devotes himself to rattlesnakes.
He relocates unwanted snakes from under neighbors’ porches, sheds, and barns, and works to educate and change the attitudes of his neighbors – one by one. Because of Jardine’s efforts snake deaths in Vermont by rock and hoe have tapered off.
Last year, Jardine bought forty acres of land within a mile of Vermont’s largest den just to have rattlesnakes on his property. Should he die in Iraq, Jardine has created the Timber Rattlesnake Fund to be administered by The Nature Conservancy, to help protect the endangered Vermont population.
Ironically, I had traveled two thousand miles to meet a man committed to the survival of timber rattlesnakes in Vermont. And one who understands that long term education is the key.
Ted Levin is a writer, photographer and winner of the 2004 Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.