It's that time of year.
Saw a Letter to the Editor today from a Massachusetts state-agency herpetologist. The adult male timber rattlesnakes are moving around in search of eligible females. The whole letter was a defense of the endangered timber rattler. I was not aware, before the statement in this letter, that ye olde Puritans used to make a point of locating dens and exterminating every last rattlesnake therein.

The letter also testifies to the police responding to a call about an adult male rattlesnake near someone's house. The letter praises the police for handling the rattler with the respect due an endangered-species specimen, trapping it alive, and taking it well away to give it a less hostile place to live.

Massachusetts citizens, the noisy defensive ignorant ones, are up in arms about having a timber rattlesnake sanctuary on an island in the manmade Quabbin Reservoir in north-central MA. Actually the rattler trapped in the previous incident was not only a fair ways away from the Quabbin Reservoir, it was on the South Shore -- in West Quincy! While this area includes a geographic feature called the Blue Hills, with a Reservation (beautiful site), the locale's outstanding feature today is State Route 128, one of the Hub's wheel-rims, connecting bedroom communities for commuters to urban Boston. That poor snake is lucky he WASN'T slaughtered this summer.