Kevin McCurley sat quietly on the rocky ledge as the rattlesnake flicked its tongue at him, the turkey sandwich McCurley had been eating forgotten.
After a few flicks, the rattlesnake decided that McCurley was no threat, but was merely in its way. The snake crawled over McCurley’s knee and into the forest.
But for a New Englander, within a day’s drive only timber rattlesnakes offered that level of beauty, complexity, and – let’s face it – adrenalin rush.
Timber rattlesnakes have been eradicated from Rhode Island and Maine. They are listed as endangered species on the state level in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. In New England, the humans have won and the rattlesnakes have lost in a big way.
McCurley spent days watching rattlesnakes in the wild. He would focus on one location for a few seasons, and then move on. After he had gotten to know many of the region’s wild rattlesnakes by their distinctive markings and favourite basking spots, he noticed something.
He knew how fragile the rattlesnakes’ hold on New England was, where this disease would have a disproportionate effect on the population. McCurley had learned to be secretive while watching rattlesnakes.
He owns several of them, kept under lock and key at his New Hampshire business, New England Reptile Distributors. His stock breed is the ball python, a snake species often recommended to people new to keeping pet snakes. He’s written a book the size of a cinder block about these snakes.
It seems crass to point out that the cheapest of McCurley’s ball pythons sells for twice the going rate of a timber rattlesnake. Yet when McCurley plays his flying-V guitar as the lead singer and lead guitarist in his very own thrash metal band, the band is not called Python. He does his thrashing under the name of the scientific genus for the timber rattlesnake, Crotalus.