A Naturalist in Florida
| KAREN: One of Archie's real concerns was the decrease of snake populations in Florida, but also throughout the country. This was something that really concerned him. | |
| ARCHIE: The United States is blessed with a great diversity of harmless snakes that really ought to be appreciated more. They ought to be watched. Snakes are harder to find than birds. They don't fly about or sing. And it may be quite a while before the snake does anything. If you have the misfortune to come upon one that has just eaten, there may be little or no action for quite a while - for up to a week, perhaps, or in extreme cases even longer. Some people don't have that kind of time to put into the venture and go back to watching birds. When Rachel Carson chose the name Silent Spring for her epoch making book, the silence she had in mind was lost birdsong on a poisoned Earth. The book was a powerful document and people took heed of it. This was good for the birds, but it left unattended a lot of other creatures that had no songs to start with and had been silent all the time. Snakes, for instance. I want to speak in behalf of snakes. Snakes seem to me to be disappearing very fast. | |
| KAREN: Here on the Prairie it really was extreme. Particularly after they built the Interstate highway across the Prairie and the other highways, as well, those were just killing fields as far as snakes were concerned. At certain times of the year, you would see hundreds of snakes killed on the road, as they would try to cross the highway to get from one area of water level on the prairie to the other side. | |
| TOM CARR: We would go out and walk the prairie - Paynes Prairie - and pick up 175 snakes and then let them go at the end of the walk. It wasn't a formal census, it's just something we did. By the later years he realized that we could barely pick up four. | |
| KAREN: One of the stories that Archie wrote that always had a lot of influence on people - that was an influential story if you will - was one where he wrote about the last rattlesnake. And he had envisioned the point where the rattlesnake population had been reduced to a single individual. That then a human saw and raised a stick, as if to kill. And he left the story there with the question of whether rattlesnakes would be totally obliterated by that humans movement or whether the rattlesnake in the last would be spared. |
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