![]() ![]() If rattlesnakes were classified like garden vegetables, they would be Zone 4 reptiles growing in Zone 3. The number of frost-free days is not nearly as important as the number of days the snake’s body temperature is above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. But at the insistence of Fish and Game Commissioner Charles Berry, the timber rattlesnake was axed from the final endangered species list submitted to the governor – to the chagrin of few.įor a timber rattlesnake to prosper in Vermont or New Hampshire, heat is essential. (At the time, peregrines were extinct in the Northeast.) Except for falcons and Atlantic salmon – another distinguished creature in the conservation limelight – timber rattlesnakes had the third highest ranking, higher than that of bald eagles, osprey, loons, even higher than lynx – which were on the verge of extinction in New Hampshire – and pine marten, which were then already gone. Timber rattlesnakes received a rating of 25, two points higher than the arbitrary cutoff for threatened species and only 0.6 points lower than the rating given to peregrine falcons, the recipients of a multimillion-dollar, nationwide restoration effort. After six hours of debating the relative merits of the more than 40 animals proposed for the list, we voted, using a point system that assigned numbers to various wildlife according to their degree of rarity and their scientific and scenic value. I was on a team of naturalists asked to recommend to the Commissioner of Fish and Game which animals warranted inclusion on the state’s new endangered species list. Why not the timber rattlesnake? Why is this timid reptile still subjected to the same fear and loathing here in New England that brought down our region’s great predators?ĭuring the 1979 legislative session, the State of New Hampshire passed a comprehensive bill to protect endangered and threatened vertebrates. I’ve never seen them there myself.īy the early years of the 21st century, we’ve made our peace with virtually every other North American beast: the owl and the eagle, the wolf and the catamount, the alligator and the crocodile, the silver-tip grizzly. The last official sighting of a rattlesnake in the Connecticut River valley was on the slopes of Little Ascutney Mountain in the mid-1950s, though reports persist of snakes on the ledges above Boston Lot in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. But of the more than twenty sites in Vermont that once supported rattlesnakes, I know of only three that still do. Yes, you read that correctly, rattlesnakes in Vermont. Funny text.I am climbing through the brush with Alcott Smith, a veterinarian who spends more time in the woods than in the clinic, on a pilgrimage to one of the last extant rattlesnake ledges in Vermont. ![]() Did I mention that West of Loathing has a lot of text? West of Loathing has a lot of text.īut it’s good text. Or just, like, talk to them for a long, long time. In a black-and-white side-scrolling world, you play as a young cowboy or cowgirl who’s heading west to seek fortune and punch cows. The game’s developers describe it as a “slapstick comedy stick-figure wild west adventure role-playing game”, and while that phrase rolls off the tongue with all the grace of an entire tumbleweed erupting from your throat, it’s basically accurate. West of Loathing is a single-player spin-off of long-running stick figure MMO Kingdom of Loathing. It marches to the beat of its own drum, spits into its own spittoon, and tells its own poop jokes. West of Loathing, though, defies categorisation. You have your multiplayer survival game of the week, your triple-A hit, your discounted indie, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and so on. Most of the time, it isn’t terribly difficult to slot games on Steam’s best-sellers list into categories.
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