nearby nature

I'd never heard the term "thrillcraft" until I saw it in the title of an e-mail the other morning. It arrived in a posting from an environmental listserve reviewing an anthology of essays by that name expounding upon the dangers to nature of off-road vehicles.

This past weekend I drove to Charlottesville, Virginia to speak at a reading sponsored by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a group responsible for some of the best and most important conservation work being done in the South. I like to think of SELC as the legal voice for Southern land and animals.

It's been over a year since I wrote about snakes, but I think it's time. SNAKES ON A PLANE has brought my reptile friends into the spotlight, and once again they're getting a bad rap.

I have enjoyed encounters with snakes for three decades now and still mark my years by the first snake I see in the spring. The year 2006 it was a Northern Brown Snake out in the yard, a slug, earthworm, and insect eater only 10 inches long. It turned up in some wood I was moving. I picked it up, admired it, and then placed it back under the log.