I opened up National Today to read this morning to look around for something I might like to write about today. On most days I can find something to write about that relates to backpacking or camping. If neither of those peeks around the list of days find anything, I’ll find a day related to some outdoor activity, or perhaps something environmental.
I wasn’t disappointed when I looked today and found my topic, quite easily I must say, because it’s Rattlesnake Roundup Day, certainly one of the more unusual days I’m likely to write about.
I’ve met a few rattlesnakes out on the trail, and I’ve found their bad reputation is undeserved. I have to ask, what do you think of there being such a day devoted to chasing snakes?
Let me start off by saying I have an aversion to rattlesnakes, they strike fear into my heart. But, at the same time, I also have a great respect for rattlesnakes. In case you wondered, I also have a fascination with snakes in general, and very specifically a fascination with rattlesnakes.
Who said Monster isn’t complex?
An’ I don’t give a damn ’bout my bad reputation…
Joan Jett & the Blackhearts
I ain’t afraid of no snake…
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see – not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My earliest recollection of meeting snakes up close and in person was at Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines when I was in first or second grade. My Mother had a very real fear of snakes, she would even cover her eyes for movie scenes that featured snakes. Despite those fears Mom took me to a live snake show at the zoo in Des Moines, Iowa.
At first the herpetologists brought snakes around by hand to show the crowd, up close and personal. Mom wouldn’t sit near the front, in fact she sat back in the last row, but she let me go down and sit in the front row. At first the snakes being brought around were not poisonous, and I was on the edge of my seat with anticipation.
That changed, however, when they started handling the poisonous snakes. Instead of reaching into the portable cases that were used to carry the snake, they dumped the rattlesnakes and it’s poisonous cousins out onto the ground, and used snake hooks to control them.
I was not afraid of poisonous snakes, well not until they tried to slither straight at me. At least that’s what my 7 year old brain was telling me… My mind was telling me that every damn poisonous snake they dumped out onto the ground was coming straight at me.
Before long at all, I was there in the back row with Mom again. I was a brave little second grader, but not quite brave enough to face rattlesnakes on my own.
Setting the Scene – Southern Illinois
Every great story seems to begin with a snake.
Nicolas Cage
While I’ve never been a big fan of rattlesnakes, that hasn’t stopped me from encountering more than my share while out on the trail. One of the most memorable was an nighttime encounter with a rattlesnake in Shawnee National Forest when I was a Junior in High School.
The school I attended, Rivermont Collegiate, being a private school, offered a good number of extracurricular activities. One of those being the “Spring Science Expedition” to Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois near Kentucky. It’s an ancient landscape “framed” by a pair of very large rivers, the Ohio and the Mississippi. The reason I call the landscape ancient, is that the area was not directly disturbed during the the relatively recent (in the geologic sense) series of ice advances and retreats known as the “Ice Age”.
In some ways the region reminds me of the “Driftless Area” in parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois where glaciers also did not reach. The terrain is extremely dissected with innumerable squiggles of rivers and valleys. In the driftless area, there are almost no ways to go directly from Point A to Point B because the ancient eroded landscape does not make for straight efficient highways.
Southern Illinois is not quite as eroded as the Driftless Area, but it’s rivers and streams have certainly left their mark. The ancient Ohio River, not routed as it is today, swept across southern Illinois leaving behind what can only be described as swampland in its former wake.
Umm, that’s not a stick!
Love hath made thee a tame snake.
William “the Bard” Shakespeare
So, there I was with a select group of students on a week long school trip to Shawnee National Forest. The trip was in early May, so everything was very lush and green. These were some serious woods, more of a forest-land than I’d ever seen in one place.
We were on a night hike to a relatively flat bluff area called Bald Knob. I was among the group of faster walkers who got ahead of the rest of the group, certainly at least a quarter mile, and perhaps as much as a half-mile ahead.
My best friend at the time, a kid by the name of Mike Pippinger who was looking for a branch to use as a hiking stick, saw a promising prospect laying in the road ahead. Probably four or four and one-half feet long, and straight as a rail, it looked like he’d hit paydirt in his quest.
I pointed my flashlight beam straight at the stick, and swore I could see it move. Mike went bounding ahead of us to claim his prize, and just before he got there I saw it move again.
“Hey Mike,” I yelled ahead, “I’m not so sure that’s a stick, you might want to wait.”
Doing the Rattlesnake Shake
The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My friend caught himself just before he bent over to claim his walking stick. The stick had moved!
“Sticks don’t coil,” I yelled ahead.
“The don’t rattle either,” Pippi replied.
I’m not sure if the term “snark” was in common use by 1979, I likely think not. Regardless of small details like that, we were undoubtedly snarky!
“You might want to tell Mr. Pearson,” I said, naming the science teacher who was one of two faculty on the trip. As my buddy bounded back to our teacher, I stood at a respectful distance, observing our new reptilian friend. I imagined we’d walk on the far side of the gravel road, giving the snake respectful distance, and finish our hike.
I never imagined what came to pass would actually occur.
An old fashioned stoning…
I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
Anais Nin
Like I said, while my heart might have been racing from seeing the snake, I didn’t consider it to be too big a deal. My science teacher, on the other hand, had different ideas.
“Considering this is a foot and horse path, we might want to do something about this,” the science teacher stated. He conferred with the other faculty person, a French teacher named Madam Melotte. Apparently they decided on action. The snake was off the road now, but still only a foot or two away from the graveled two-track road we were hiking.
Mr. Pearson quickly found a long branch, perhaps six or seven feet long, while the rest of us carefully found softball sized stones. While Pippinger and I held the branch fast to the ground, pinning the snake, Mr Pearson threw the large stones at the rattlesnake, who was now giving off that very distinctive noise, the rattlesnake rattle.
I could tell you how distinctive the noise was, that rattle. It was distinctive, for sure, but my skills with words are not up to the task. And, I have to say, it was all over too quickly.
One minute there was this beautiful terrifying creature, his reptilian eyes, the coiled menace, all implying inherent and imminent danger. And then it was just a hunk of flesh on a stone outcrop. There was a red stain on the rock, the stone outcrop slightly chipped from the stones that we had rained down to crush it’s skull, and, of course, the snake’s limp body.
My “Aldo Leopold” moment…
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Aldo Leopold
I wish I could tell you I expressed outrage at my teacher’s killing the rattlesnake, I did not.
I understand why he dealt with the snake in the way he did, he thought of horsemen (or horsewomen) getting badly injured. Mr. Pearson felt the snake was a bad risk and had to be removed. I don’t believe he had anything against snakes in general, and if I had to guess, in retrospect, I’d place money on him being a horseman of some sort.
Why else would he immediately decide that we had to protect future horse riders? When it was all said and done, I felt shame. Shame that we had killed such a beautiful creature.
The next morning the snake was collected, it was taken back to the school. As an afterschool project one of the other students removed the meat and ribs, and then preserved the snakeskin for display. I wanted no part of that. It felt barbaric somehow, to display an animal skin like a trophy in the school
Rattlesnakes are magnificent creatures
Snake’s poison is life to the snake; it is in relation to man that it means death.
Rumi
There are many problems in the world today, from climate change to the widespread extinction of species, and snakes are no exception…
Long-term studies have revealed population declines in fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. In birds, and particularly amphibians, these declines are a global phenomenon whose causes are often unclear. Among reptiles, snakes are top predators and therefore a decline in their numbers may have serious consequences for the functioning of many ecosystems.
Are snake populations in widespread decline?
One of the problems with this world is that there are too few snakes, and that has a cascading effect across the environment. Take some rattlesnakes away and pest populations are no longer controlled by predation.
Pest populations usually have tremendous breeding potential, this helps them survive in the face of predation. However, if you take away the predators, there is nothing to control pests, leading to an explosion in pest populations. At this point, nothing good can really happen, growing pest populations will eventually eat every bit of available food. Then instead of being controlled by predators, their populations found in much higher numbers, will only be controlled by starvation.
In other words, while we may have made the road a little safer for horses, we also made it quite a bit safer for rodents. That’s a bad trade!
Only morons celebrate the potential extinction of species…
Rattlesnake Roundup Day is held annually on January 28, and we are geared up to go into the wild and do some rattlesnake hunting. Did you know that Rattlesnakes got their name because of their tail tip, which features a segmented rattle that produces a buzzing sound when they vibrate? Rattlesnakes are beautiful creatures, but they can be very poisonous and their toxin fatal.
This is a perfect example of a holiday for morons. I mean, only a moron could get excited about rounding up and killing a threatened species. Am I right?
And it’s not like this is something new. The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, the Dodo Bird, Stellar’s Sea Cow, and the Golden Toad are perfect examples of the road we are headed down.
Recent studies estimate something around eight million species on Earth. Today, at least 15,000 species are threatened with extinction. It’s hard to perfectly pinpoint an exact extinction rate because many endangered species have not even been studied or even identified yet.
Earth is full of morons…
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Walt Kelly
By even mentioning this holiday I could do rattlesnakes a potential disservice.
I’m hoping to have the opposite effect, I’m hoping you too will mock Rattlesnake Round Up Day, I’m hoping you too will treat the day with absolute disdain. Or perhaps find a different way to celebrate wonderful reptiles. Yep, that me, that guy who’s afraid of snakes calling them wonderful reptiles, who would have thought?
I think every generation of people on earth tend to blame their predecessors for what’s wrong in the world. It’s not always so simple, man has been despoiling the earth for a long time. I know that man likely played a role in the extinction of megafauna at the end of the last ice age and that carnage and destruction is still ongoing.
A hypothesis or two – Looking at our long lost megafauna…
The extinction of megafauna, or large animals, at the end of the last ice age is a complex and controversial topic. There are two main hypotheses: climate change and human impact. Some researchers suggest that both factors played a role, while others argue for one or the other.
Climate change refers to the rapid and drastic changes in temperature, precipitation, and vegetation that occurred during the last glacial period, especially the Younger Dryas event, which was a sudden and severe cold spell that lasted from about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. These changes may have reduced the availability and quality of food and water for the megafauna, as well as increased the risk of disease and predation.
Human impact refers to the arrival and expansion of anatomically modern humans across the continents, starting from about 65,000 years ago in Australia, 30,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, and 15,000 years ago in the Americas. Humans may have hunted the megafauna to extinction, either directly or indirectly, by competing for resources, altering habitats through fire, or introducing new diseases and invasive species.
The evidence for each hypothesis is based on various sources, such as fossil records, radiocarbon dating, genetic analysis, climate models, and archaeological artifacts. However, the evidence is often incomplete, inconsistent, or contradictory, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions. Moreover, the timing and extent of megafauna extinction varied across regions and species, suggesting that different factors may have been more or less important in different cases.
Trying to evaluate the evidence…
One way to evaluate the hypotheses is to compare the timing of human arrival and megafauna extinction in different regions. If humans were the main cause, then we would expect to see a close correlation between the two events. However, this is not always the case. For example, in Africa and Eurasia, where humans and megafauna coexisted for a long time, the extinction rate was relatively low. In contrast, in Australia, North America, and South America, where humans arrived relatively late, the extinction rate was very high. However, there are also exceptions, such as New Zealand, where humans arrived around 1280 CE, but the megafauna survived until the 15th century.
Another way to evaluate the hypotheses is to examine the ecological and environmental conditions that affected the megafauna. If climate change was the main cause, then we would expect to see a close correlation between the climatic and vegetational shifts and the extinction events. However, this is also not always the case. For example, in Australia, the megafauna extinction preceded the major climatic changes by several thousand years. In contrast, in Europe and Asia, the megafauna extinction coincided with the Younger Dryas event, but some species survived until the Holocene.
Therefore, the role of humans in the megafauna extinction is likely, but not certain, and may have varied depending on the region, the species, and the interaction with other factors. More research is needed to resolve the debate and understand the full impact of the megafauna extinction on the Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity.
Will that be the fate of rattlesnakes?
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.
Chester W. Nimitz
There is hope, despite knowing that mankind is often our own worst enemy.
While researching this piece, I ran across an article that gives me some hope for this day – Activists praise first rattlesnake roundup free of catching, killing. The article reports on the Whigham Rattlesnake Roundup in Georgia, which held its first “wildlife-friendly” event on March 5, 2022.
Instead of catching and killing rattlesnakes, the event featured educational displays and presentations about the snakes and their conservation. However, the article also notes that some rattlesnake roundups in other states, such as Texas, still involve hunting and harming the snakes, which is criticized as inhumane and environmentally harmful.
The change to a snake friendly roundup is very much a positive step, but the fact that it’s still practiced in many places by corralling wild snakes to kill, not so much.
So tell me, is there hope for a world safe for rattlesnakes?
I’d like to hope so, but still, I wonder…
One Comment
Comments are closed.