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When the tow truck arrived a while later, the driver noticed Levin was wearing a yellow T-shirt bearing a picture of a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” based on the flag that Gen. William Gadsden designed at the start of the American Revolution.
“He immediately assumed I was a member of the Tea Party or something,” Levin said this week. “He slapped me five and said, ‘I’m right there, brother.’ ”
Little did the driver know that Levin had succumbed to the temptation to go online and buy the shirt and a matching bumper sticker because he was just starting to do research for America’s Snake, a 400-plus-page book about the timber rattler.
Little did Levin know, for that matter, until Audubon magazine commissioned him in 2007 to write an article about rattlesnakes, with which he’d been fascinated since boyhood.
“I was out with a post-doc in Elmira, N.Y., who was studying them, and realized, ‘There’s something going on here,’ ” Levin recalled during a telephone interview, on his way to Indianapolis to read from and sign copies of the book, which the University of Chicago Press released on May 3. “ ‘There must be a way to disseminate this stuff.’ ”
At first, while approaching publishers, Levin, who had just finished a tome about the Everglades, wanted to write about all species of rattlers in the Western Hemisphere. Then his agent helped persuade him to focus on one of the last major predators in the eastern United States, the better to follow what the book’s subtitle describes as the timber rattler’s “rise and fall.”
“It took me a whole year to rewrite the proposal,” Levin recalled. “In the end, it just made more sense. This way, I could dive deep into the subjet and still be able to see my kid play hockey and baseball … I just wouldn’t have had the time or the energy or the room.”
Along with traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard, visiting dens in western Vermont, the Adironacks and beyond, and following a quirky variety of enthusiasts aiming to save the species from extinction, Levin needed time and energy just to read. The list of books he consulted covers four pages of his bibliography, in which he also cites five pages’ worth of newspaper accounts of snake sightings and attacks, two pages’ worth of magazine articles and 11 pages’ worth of scientific journal articles, book chapters, scholarly papers and government reports.
Among the revelations he found in his readings and interviews: About five people a year die of bites from all forms of venomous snakes in the United States, most because the victims received little or no timely first aid. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine documents that nearly all bites are to the extremities, mostly hands and arms of people deliberately trying to handle or attack the snakes.
“In the recorded history of Vermont, only five snakebites have been reported, and four were nonfatal: Bristol in the early 1800s, Ludlow in 1959, Blatsky in 2003, and East Steeple in 2010, when a middle-aged white male was bitten twice on the hand while attempting to move a snake off the road as his wife watched from the front seat of their car,” Levin writes. “What tool did he use to move that snake with? A tongue depressor. The fifth, Vermont’s only fatality, marked by a weathered headstone in Putney that allegedly reads, ‘Killed by a Serpente.’ In New York there has been one documented death in the twentieth century: in 1929, Charles Snyder, the former head keeper in the Reptile House in the Bronx Zoo, was fatally bitten while collecting rattlesnakes in the Hudson Highlands.”
Closer to home, Levin learned, timber rattlers occupied the slopes of loose rock in the palisades along the Connecticut River in Fairlee a century ago, and “they were still on Wantastiquet Mountain, across the river from Brattleboro, late in the last century” as well as in Springfield, Vt., in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Some states offered bounties on the timber rattler into the 1970s, at $1 a rattle.
“There was one county in the Adirondacks that paid $5 a rattle,” Levin said this week. “People would kill them in Vermont and boat them across Lake Champlain for the bigger bounty.”
While centuries of deliberate efforts to eradicate timber rattlers cut into the population, Levin learned that the biggest threats to the species nowadays include domestic and overseas collectors of live specimens — “They’re still sought after on the black market because they’re so beautiful, with an amazing variety of markings” — and the loss or at least the constriction of habitat to human development, especially roads.
“Where highways and roads isolate populations, it leads to inbreeding,” Levin said. “It’s a prescription for extinction.”
So, he discovered, is the way timber rattlers, as opposed to other species of snakes, react to traffic while crossing highways. The book cites a researcher in South Carolina who used a Chevy Silverado pick-up truck to create vibrations.
“Black racers boogied across the road, while timber rattlesnakes froze in the road,” Levin said. “In places where 5,000 to 6,000 cars a day go by, that would mathematically eliminate their chances of making it across.”
And yet, in areas where they enjoy relative protection, males can live 40 or more years, while females as old as 45 have been documented still producing eggs.
“Just think: There are some out there that were conceived and born the summer of Woodstock,” Levin said. “They might live to be 65 or 70.”
To protect and prolong those populations, “I try to be as cryptic as possible about exact locations” in the book, Levin said. In New Hampshire, for example, the one viable population lives in the Merrimack Valley, while some remain in the Blue Hills state reservation 10 miles south of Boston and in northern Westchester County near New York City.
Levin said that interest in his book has grown since the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife announced a plan to introduce up to 150 timber rattlers to an uninhabited island in the Quabbin Reservoir, the central Massachusetts source of Boston’s drinking water. While residents surrounding the reservoir are fretting about the possibility of stray rattlers swimming to the mainland, Levin wrote in a March article for The Boston Globe, their release “may pose far more danger to the snakes themselves than there ever will be to shoreline fishermen or outdoors enthusiasts.”
In the epilogue to the book, Levin recalls a visit to an unidentified valley in the mid-spring of 2015. Timber rattlers are emerging from their dens after a long, hard winter, soaking up the sun.
“Later in the day, as the talus heats up, they’ll withdraw into the recesses of the rocks, immersed in Earth’s cool breath,” Levin writes. “To find them, I’ll bend over and comb the nooks and crannies with my LED beam or reflected sunlight off a mirror. Some snakes will be visible, a loop here, a loop there, a rattle, a head, perhaps an unsettling buzz, but most will remain hidden in passages just beyond the flashlight like the knowledge that they belong here in the Northeast, living lives uninterrupted as apex predators.”
Ted Levin’s new book,
Add Richard Blanco, the Cuban-born poet who wrote and recited his One Today for President Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, to the list of presenters at the Bookstock literary festival in Woodstock the last weekend of July.
Bookstock organizers also announced the addition of the following speakers: Veteran Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher, who will read from his new novel God’s Kingdom; Northern Stage directors Carol Dunne and Eric Bunge, who will talk about the creative process behind producing a season of theater; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham; and best-selling novelist Jan Ellison. For a full schedule, visit bookstockvt.org.
On June 2 at the Quechee Library, the Vermont Humanities Council will host a discussion of All the President’s Men, the book that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote about their pursuit of the causes and consequences of the break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., by operatives of the committee to re-elect President Richard Nixon. The discussion begins at 6:30. For more information, call Kate Schaal at 802-295-1232.
Kenneth Glass, proprietor of Boston’s renowned Brattle Book Shop and a frequent on-air appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, lectures on “The Value of Old and Rare Books” at Woodstock’s Norman Williams Public Library on Wednesday afternoon at 4:30. He also will answer questions and, depending on what members of the audience bring, appraise some books, letters and manuscripts. Admission is free.
Naturalist Bill Betty presents his PowerPoint lecture, “Return of the Native: Mountain Lion in the Northeast,” on Saturday afternoon at 2:30, at the mezzanine level of the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock. For more information, call 802-457-2295.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.