Tennant and Bartlett’s Snakes of North America by Jonathan Crowe
The OHS News 84 (Winter 2000)

Snakes of North America: Eastern and Central Regions
by Alan Tennant and R. D. Bartlett
Gulf, 2000. Paperback, xxv + 588 pp. ISBN 0-87719-307-X

Snakes of North America: Western Region
by R. D. Bartlett and Alan Tennant
Gulf, 2000. Paperback, xvi + 312 pp. ISBN 0-87719-312-6

Snake nuts will want to know about these books. If, like me, they are particularly fond of North American snakes, they may already own copies of the three field guides already published by Gulf: A Field Guide to Snakes of Florida and A Field Guide to Texas Snakes (the latter already in its second edition), both by Alan Tennant, and A Field Guide to Snakes of California by Philip Brown. Brown’s guide is not as satisfying as the two by Tennant, which provide a heady amount of information on each subspecies, more than could be found in any other field guide. And while Texas and Florida have a lot of snakes between the two of them, I couldn’t help but want even more — information on the snakes that didn’t live in either state.

Now, in two new volumes, one of which is over 600 pages, those wants have been fulfilled. Snakes of North America, in particular the volume on eastern and central regions, takes many of its species accounts more or less directly from the books on Texas and Florida, and the overlap can be considerable. The volume on the western region, on which collaborator Dick Bartlett is the lead author, is considerably slimmer. Not having Tennant’s detailed subspecies accounts from his previous books to draw upon, the western volume covers snakes on a species-by-species (rather than subspecies-by-subspecies) basis, leaving most subspecies with a paragraph of description at most. Are western subspecies less well-defined than eastern subspecies? Less detailed and slimmer, the western volume is more spartan: it lacks the eastern volume’s bibliography and glossary, too.

Some tradeoffs have to be made when moving to the continental scale. Chapters on habitat and identification keys would be too unwieldy in this context, and the maps suffer a similar loss of detail and precision. The maps are particularly problematic in the eastern and central volume for Canadian readers, as they quite often do not include Canada at all (though their Canadian range is discussed in the text). On the western side, the maps show all races of a given species at once, which makes them more difficult to decipher. On the plus side, the photographs of every single North American subspecies (some of which have several photos) are stunning, and represent a visual resource impossible to find anywhere else.

The attraction of having a complete reference on the snakes of North America cannot be understated. Even if you’ve already shelled out for the previous guides, I very much doubt that snake nuts will be able to resist. Curse these insidious Gulf people.

Note: This article has not been updated since its first publication. As a result, some of the facts referred to in the text may now be out of date.