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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 181NEWSBRIEFS

Canada’s Roadkill Hot Spot
The fourth deadliest road in the world
for turtles just got a little safer. Work
crews finished laying 2,500 meters of
temporary fencing this week to prevent
turtles and other creatures from wander-
ing out of their marshlands onto the
Long Point (Ontario) Causeway. “It’s just
an attempt to stop the carnage right
now,” said reptile biologist Scott
Gillingwater, shortly after finding a
Midland Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta
marginata) squashed into the pavement
on which 10,000 animals die each year.

Long Point, extending into Lake
Erie south of Brantford, defines one of
the most biologically diverse regions in
Canada. The United Nations recognizes
the peninsula and its neighboring wet-
lands as one of the country’s 13 World
Biosphere Reserves, with multitudes of
birds, animals, and reptiles, including
eight types of turtles and 18 kinds of
snakes — but the wetlands lie between
the mainland and the peninsula. In
1927, authorities built a 3.5-km cause-
way to allow car access to cottages, fish-
ing spots, and public beach areas that
later developed into a provincial park.
They created a killing field.

“My father and his dad often talk
about their trips to their cottage on Long
Point ...,” area biologist Paul Ashley
wrote two years ago in BirdWatch
Canada. “My grandfather reminisces that
back then the turtles and snakes were so
thick that you couldn’t help but run over
a few.” Now population numbers are
dropping noticeably.

“The Northern Map Turtle
[Graptemys geographica] is a species of
special concern,” reptile biologist
Gillingwater said, as he stepped through

the marshes to examine nesting sites.
“The Blanding’s Turtle [Emydoidea
blandingii] is threatened, and the Eastern
Fox Snake [Elaphe gloydi] has recently
been upgraded ... from threatened to
endangered.”

With warm weather, turtles begin
roaming widely in search of mates or
places to lay eggs. Skunks, foxes, and pos-
sums will eat most of the eggs. Birds and
bullfrogs will go after hatchlings. Only a
few turtles will survive to adulthood.
Several years ago, Canadian Wildlife
Service researchers estimated that
between April and October the causeway
handles 2,250 car trips a day. On sum-
mer weekends the number quadruples.
The same study found that 10,000 ani-
mals a year die on the road — mostly
Leopard Frogs (Rana pipiens), but 99
other species as well. Another Canadian
Wildlife Service study showed that some
drivers run over turtles and snakes for
sport. “Working from existing literature,
U.S. conservationist Matthew Aresco of
northern Florida named Long Point
Causeway the world’s fourth-worst road
for turtle mortality after three U.S. roads.
Area residents decided enough was
enough.

Two years ago, some 20 local groups
came together to rebuild the causeway.
They decided that permanent barriers to
the roadway and underground passages
must be created for animals. Waterways
must be opened for spawning fish. A
$40,000 feasibility study by a Kitchener,
Ontario, firm recently put renovation
costs at $14–20 million. Provincial and
national bodies would need to get
involved. In the meantime, the Ontario

Species at Risk Stewardship Fund has
paid $30,300 to erect 2,500 m of plastic
fencing toward the south end of the
causeway. Sand is also being dumped
inside the fences as temporary turtle nest-
ing areas. A modest start, perhaps, but
the efforts should save a few turtles.

John Goddard, Toronto Star

Snake-handling Pastor Arrested
The pastor of a Kentucky church that
handles snakes in religious rites was
among ten people arrested by wildlife
officers in a crackdown on the venomous
snake trade. Undercover officers pur-
chased more than 200 illegal reptiles dur-
ing the investigation. More than 100
snakes, many of them deadly, were con-
fiscated in the undercover sting after
Thursday’s arrests, said Col. Bob
Milligan, director of law enforcement for
Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. Most were
taken from the Middlesboro home of
Gregory James Coots, including 42
Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix), 11
Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus),
three Cottonmouth Water Moccasins (A.
piscivorus), a Western Diamondback
Rattlesnake (C. atrox), two cobras and a
Puff Adder (Bitis arietans).

Handling snakes is practiced in a
handful of fundamentalist churches
across Appalachia, based on the interpre-
tation of Bible verses saying true believ-
ers can take up serpents without being
harmed. The practice is illegal in most
states, including Kentucky.

Coots, 36, is pastor of the Full
Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in

N E W S B R I E F S

A Midland Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta
marginata) makes the trek across the treach-
erous causeway. 

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DANGER ZONES
The top five sites for turtle roadkill per mile are:

1. U.S. Highway 27 at Lake Jackson near Tallahassee, Florida.
2. U.S. Highway 441 at Payne’s Prairie Preserve State Park near Gainesville,

Florida.
3. U.S. Highway 93, Mission Valley, Montana.
4. Long Point Causeway, Ontario.
5. Cape May, New Jersey.

Matthew Aresco, Lake Jackson Ecopassage Alliance

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Middlesboro, where a Tennessee woman
died after being bitten by a rattlesnake
during a service in 1995. Her husband
died three years later when he was bitten
by a snake in northeastern Alabama.
Coots was charged Thursday with buy-
ing, selling, and possessing illegal reptiles.
He had no listed telephone number and
could not be reached for comment.

The snakes, plus one alligator, were
turned over to the nonprofit Kentucky
Reptile Zoo in Slade. Most appeared to
have been captured from the wild, with
some imported from Asia and Africa.
Zoo Director Jim Harrison said some of
the animals would likely have become
exotic pets had they not been seized.
“There’s been a large trade in exotics for
years,” he said. “Some people are just fas-
cinated with them.” “You can purchase
anything off the Internet except common
sense,” Harrison said. “A venomous
snake isn’t a pet. You don’t play with it. If
you do, you’re an idiot.”

Butler’s Garter Snake in Trouble
The Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources (DNR) is changing the way it
interprets its authority and definition of
“Take” under the Wisconsin Endangered
Species Law, and is proposing a new “reg-
ulatory framework” for the Butler’s
Garter Snake (Thamnophis butleri).
These changes would remove most pro-
tections for habitat utilized by endan-
gered and threatened species, substan-
tially reducing the Department’s
regulatory jurisdiction. The new Butler’s
Garter Snake “framework” would allow
unregulated development of most upland
habitat utilized by the snake for its life
cycle. The Department has begun imple-
menting these changes without public
notice.

The proposed “regulatory frame-
work” is based on a new legal interpreta-
tion of “Take” and the Department’s
jurisdiction, which suggests that if no
animals are immediately and obviously
killed by an action, a “Take” is avoided
and the Department has no authority,
even if the actions result in significant
harm to the resource, or deaths that are
not immediately observed. This new
interpretation does not acknowledge that
destroying a species’ habitat harms indi-
viduals of the species, and does not
acknowledge that a “Take” occurs when
mortality results when individuals return
to a lost habitat area and cannot find
food or shelter, and through loss of
reproductive potential and increased
mortality from overcrowding in remain-
ing habitat (if any remains). Such mortal-
ity would be a direct result of the unreg-
ulated habitat loss. The Department also
takes no account of cumulative harm,
jeopardy, or viability of the resource
resulting from these habitat and popula-
tion losses. This new interpretation
essentially removes protections for all
endangered and threatened species in
many, if not most, situations. It allows a
person to simply shoo an animal off, or
wait for it to walk, crawl, or fly away, per-
haps to get a drink of water, and then
destroy the habitat upon which it
depends. For the Butler’s Garter Snake,
which feeds almost exclusively on earth-
worms (which do not occupy saturated
wetland soils), upland habitat is crucial
for obtaining food and shelter, and incu-
bating embryos. The snakes depend on
grasses and other vegetation for shelter
from predators. Pregnant females seek
warm upland sunlit areas adjacent to
grasses (to which they flee when dis-
turbed). Such basking sites are crucial to
embryonic development in this ectother-
mic species so proper temperatures can
be achieved. Loss of upland habitat
would crowd snakes into wetlands, where
many would succumb to lack of food
and shelter from the elements, over-
crowding, and increased predation.
Snakes hidden within upland soil and
duff retreats at the time of grading, where
they take shelter for the night, sit out
periods of hot dry weather, and hiber-
nate, would simply be crushed by heavy
equipment.

The DNR has issued a “regulatory
framework” for selected (stakeholder)

public review. They are holding meetings
about it with stakeholders, and state they
will develop a new broad authorization
based on it after comments are received.
The new broad authorization will be
public noticed and vetted by the Natural
Resources Board (NRB). If similar to the
“framework” being distributed, this
broad authorization will automatically
approve the “Take” that results from
projects that follow certain minimization
measures, such as snake fencing, snake
removals, and staying 300 feet away from
wetland boundaries. However, the
Department, by a form letter being dis-
tributed to parties currently in the
Butler’s Garter Snake approval process,
appears to be implementing the sub-
stance of the proposed new broad
authorization before it is public noticed
or reviewed by the NRB.

The “regulatory framework” lists a
number of measures that minimize
“Take” of snakes. The draft regulatory
framework correctly refers to these as
avoidance measures that minimize
“Take,” but the form letter contradicts
this and states that these measures actu-
ally avoid “Take.” As a point of fact,
these measures do not avoid “Take,” they
only minimize it. The Department’s own
research, for example, documented that
snakes occupy habitat more than 300 ft
from a wetland boundary (Joppa and
Temple. 2005. Use of upland habitat by
Butler’s Garter Snake (Thamnophis but-
leri). Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological
Society 40:221–227), and ample evidence
exists of snakes crossing fence lines and
over-wintering in uplands. The incorrect
portrayal of minimization measures as
complete avoidance is the basis for the
removal of protections, and unsupported
by science.

182 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 NEWSBRIEFS

Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) are fre-
quently handled in a small number of fun-
damentalist churches who trust that true
believers can take up serpents without being
harmed.

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The Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources (DNR) is proposing a new “regu-
latory framework” for the Butler’s Garter
Snake (Thamnophis butleri) that would
remove most protections for habitat utilized
by this and other endangered and threatened
species.

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 183NEWSBRIEFS

If any of these measures are imple-
mented, the draft framework allows the
project to proceed with no further
review, ceding its authority to require
conservation measures to avoid cumula-
tive harm and jeopardy. This will result
in nearly complete loss of the upland
habitats on which the species depends,
with no mitigation required.

The “regulatory framework” uses an
unsupported definition of “over-winter-
ing habitat,” essentially equating it with
wetlands. This is repeated in the form let-
ter. However, ample evidence indicates
that snakes hibernate in certain upland
situations, such as crayfish burrows, rot-
ted tree root channels, loose fill, and old
foundations. The Department acknowl-
edges this by claiming that they will
study the matter. The assertion that
Butler’s Garter Snakes only hibernate in
wetlands is not supported by a single sci-
entist, and the “Take” associated with
developing upland overwintering sites is
being allowed without regulation.

The “regulatory framework,” if
approved as a new broad authorization,
would provide a path leading to essen-
tially no protections for the upland habi-
tat portion of Butler’s Garter Snake crit-
ical habitat (in most cases), clearly
resulting in significant harm to the
resource, with no jeopardy analysis per-
formed. The current “regulatory frame-
work” does not acknowledge this, takes
no account of cumulative harm, and
cedes the Department’s authority and
obligation to protect the resource.

The San Francisco Airport Aims to
Boost the Population of Endangered

San Francisco Garter Snakes
The Peninsula’s most tenacious popula-
tion of endangered San Francisco Garter
Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis tetrataenia) is
about to make a major comeback in a lit-
tle-known urban canal system steps away
from a concrete jungle of airport runways,
highway on-ramps, and railroad tracks.
San Francisco International Airport’s team
of planners and environmental engineers
is in the final stages of preparing for a 10-
year, $4 million project to redesign two
urban storm water canals that also happen
to be prime habitat for the San Francisco
Garter Snake. The construction project,
begining in mid-August, is designed to
dredge four miles’ worth of canals that

provide flood control for the airport while
creating a veritable snake paradise of bur-
rows, swimming holes, and hunting sites
for prey.

Motorists southbound on Highway
101 would never suspect they were
speeding by this little oasis of willow and
acacia plants along the banks of a chan-
nel that stays wet through the summer.
This is the place — Cupid’s Row Canal
in San Bruno, along with the South
Lomita Canal in Millbrae — to which
San Francisco Garter Snakes have been
restricted for the last 50 years as the sur-
rounding land has been filled with malls
and subdivisions.

The habitat enhancement project,
which is seeking an environmental per-
mit from San Francisco and several state
agencies, evolved out of an incident in
2003 when a storm flooded the neigh-
borhood around the Cupid’s Row Canal.
Both canals suffer from silt buildup and
require regular dredging, but dredging
can be tricky because of potential
impacts to the garter snake and the
California Red-legged Frog (Rana aurora
draytonii), its main source of food.

The solution on which airport offi-
cials settled was to re-engineer the canals,
creating sediment traps that would mini-
mize the need to dredge as often, and
widening the canals to create still pools
where the frogs could lay their eggs. The
next time they have to maintain the canal
a decade hence, officials hope the snake
and frog populations will have rebounded
so strongly that getting a permit won’t be
quite so complicated. “It’s like expanding
their subdivision. There’s more space for
them to set up their burrows close to the
water,” said Ernie Eavis, deputy airport
director and chief engineer.

The San Francisco Garter Snake has
been listed as endangered since 1967, its
wetland habitat threatened by develop-

ment while its prey, the Red-legged Frog,
became correspondingly rare (it is now
listed as a threatened species). By 2004,
the snake was so scarce that state officials
were asking the public to help find the
remaining population so it could be pro-
tected. In 2005, five pairs of snakes were
transported from the Netherlands to San
Francisco.

A few pockets of the distinctive
blue-and-brown snake remain, mostly in
coastal areas, such as Mori Point in
Pacifica, and in parts of coastal Santa
Cruz County. Scientists believe they orig-
inated in the flatlands around what is
now Highway 280. However, the largest
known population in the Bay Area now
exists in the narrow “West of Bayshore”
area owned and maintained by San
Francisco International Airport. The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been
aware of their presence there since the
1970s, but was under the impression that
their numbers had dwindled in recent
years. The Service was proven wrong by
a study, conducted this spring, that
found between 400 and 500 San
Francisco Garter Snakes. “It’s hard to tell
how long the snakes have been there. It’s
completely surrounded by development,
so it’s like a little island population. That
population is going to be isolated from
all the others, but at one time they were
probably able to go up the watershed and
communicate with all the others,” said
David Kelly, a Fish and Wildlife Service
biologist familiar with the project.

The snakes’ survival becomes even
more impressive considering how close
they came to being wiped out by devel-
opment. Only the fact that the airport
bought the land in the 1920s spared their
habitat.

Julia Scott, Bay Area News Group

The Bush Administration Seeks to
Kill the Endangered Species Act

Parts of the Endangered Species Act may
soon be extinct. The Bush administration
wants federal agencies to decide for them-
selves whether highways, dams, mines,
and other construction projects might
harm endangered animals and plants.
New regulations, which do not require the
approval of Congress, would reduce the
mandatory, independent reviews govern-
ment scientists have been performing for

The largest known population of endangered
San Francisco Garter Snakes (Thamnophis
sirtalis tetrataenia) in the Bay Area exists in
an area owned and maintained by San
Francisco International Airport.

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35 years, according to a draft first obtained
by The Associated Press.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne
said late Monday that the changes were
needed to ensure that the Endangered
Species Act would not be used as a “back
door” to regulate the gases blamed for
global warming. In May, the Polar Bear
became the first species declared as
threatened because of climate change.
Warming temperatures are expected to
melt the sea ice on which the bear
depends for survival.

The draft rules would bar federal
agencies from assessing the emissions
from projects that contribute to global
warming and its effect on species and
habitats. “We need to focus our efforts
where they will do the most good,”
Kempthorne said in a news conference
organized quickly after AP reported
details of the proposal. “It is important to
use our time and resources to protect the
most vulnerable species. It is not possible
to draw a link between greenhouse gas
emissions and distant observations of
impacts on species.”

If approved, the changes would rep-
resent the biggest overhaul of endangered
species regulations since 1986. They
would accomplish through rules what
conservative Republicans have been
unable to achieve in Congress: Ending
some environmental reviews that develop-
ers and other federal agencies blame for
delays and cost increases on many proj-
ects. The chairman of the House Natural
Resources Committee, which oversees the
Interior Department, said he was “deeply
troubled” by the changes. “This proposed
rule ... gives federal agencies an unaccept-
able degree of discretion to decide whether
or not to comply with the Endangered
Species Act,” said Rep. Nick Rahall, D-

WV. “Eleventh-hour rulemakings rarely if
ever lead to good government.”

The new regulations follow a pattern
by the Bush administration not to seek
input from scientists. The regulations were
drafted by attorneys at both the Interior
and Commerce Departments. Scientists
with both agencies were first briefed on
the proposal last week during a conference
call, according to an official who asked not
to be identified. Last month, in similar
fashion, the Environmental Protection
Agency surprised its scientific experts
when it decided it did not want to regu-
late greenhouse gases under the Clean Air
Act. The rule changes unveiled Monday
would apply to any project a federal
agency would fund, build, or authorize
that the agency itself determines is
unlikely to harm endangered wildlife and
their habitat. Government wildlife experts
currently participate in tens of thousands
of such reviews each year.

The revisions also would limit
which effects can be considered harmful
and set a 60-day deadline for wildlife
experts to evaluate a project when they
are asked to become involved. If no deci-
sion is made within 60 days, the project
can move ahead. “If adopted, these
changes would seriously weaken the
safety net of habitat protections that we
have relied upon to protect and recover
endangered fish, wildlife, and plants for
the past 35 years,” said John Kostyack,
executive director of the National
Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Conserv-
ation and Global Warming initiative.

Under current law, federal agencies
must consult with experts at the Fish and
Wildlife Service or the National Marine
Fisheries Service to determine whether a
project is likely to jeopardize any endan-
gered species or to damage habitat, even if
no harm seems likely. This initial review
usually results in accommodations that
better protect the 1,353 animals and
plants in the U.S. that are listed as threat-
ened or endangered, and determines
whether a more formal analysis is war-
ranted. The Interior Department said
such consultations are no longer necessary
because federal agencies have developed
expertise to review their own construction
and development projects, according to
the 30-page draft obtained by the AP. “We
believe federal action agencies will err on
the side of caution in making these deter-
minations,” the proposal said. The direc-

tor of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Dale
Hall, said the changes would help focus
expertise on “where we know we don’t
have a negative effect on the species but
where the agency is vulnerable if we don’t
complete a consultation.”

Responding to questions about the
process, Hall said, “We will not do any-
thing that leaves the public out of this
process.” The new rules were expected to
be formally proposed immediately, offi-
cials said. They would be subject to a 30-
day public comment period before being
finalized by the Interior Department.
That would give the administration
enough time to impose the rules before
November’s presidential election. A new
administration could freeze any pending
regulations or reverse them, a process
that could take months. Congress could
also overturn the rules through legisla-
tion, but that could take even longer. The
proposal was drafted largely by attorneys
in the general counsel’s offices of the
Commerce Department’s National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion and the Interior Department,
according to an official with the National
Marine Fisheries Service, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because the plan
hadn’t yet been circulated publicly. The
two agencies’ experts were not consulted
until last week, the official said.

Between 1998 and 2002, the Fish
and Wildlife Service conducted 300,000
consultations. The National Marine
Fisheries Service, which evaluates projects
affecting marine species, conducts about
1,300 reviews each year. The reviews have
helped safeguard protected species such as
Bald Eagles, Florida Panthers, and
Whooping Cranes. A federal government
handbook from 1998 described the con-
sultations as “some of the most valuable
and powerful tools to conserve listed
species.” In recent years, however, some
federal agencies and private developers
have complained that the process results in
delays and increased construction costs.
“We have always had concerns with
respect to the need for streamlining and
making it a more efficient process,” said
Joe Nelson, a lawyer for the National
Endangered Species Act Reform
Coalition, a trade group for home builders
and the paper and farming industry.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, chair-
woman of the Environment and Public
Works Committee, called the proposed

184 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 NEWSBRIEFS

Current proposals to alter regulations regard-
ing enforcement of the Endangered Species
Act would have undermined efforts to pro-
tect endangered species, such as the Gray
Whale (Eschrichtius robustus). 

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 185NEWSBRIEFS

changes illegal. “This proposed regula-
tion is another in a continuing stream of
proposals to repeal our landmark envi-
ronmental laws through the back door,”
she said. “If this proposed regulation had
been in place, it would have undermined
our ability to protect the Bald Eagle, the
Grizzly Bear, and the Gray Whale.”

The Bush administration and
Congress have attempted with mixed suc-
cess to change the law. In 2003, the
administration imposed similar rules that
would have allowed agencies to approve
new pesticides and projects to reduce
wildfire risks without asking the opinion
of government scientists about whether
threatened or endangered species and
habitats might be affected. The pesticide
rule was later overturned in court. The
Interior Department, along with the
Forest Service, is currently being sued
over the rule governing wildfire preven-
tion. In 2005, the House passed a bill that
would have made similar changes to the
Endangered Species Act, but the bill died
in the Senate. The sponsor of that bill,
then-House Natural Resources chairman
Richard Pombo, R-CA, told the AP that
allowing agencies to judge for themselves
the effects of a project will not harm
species or habitat. “There is no way they
can rubber stamp everything because they
will end up in court for every decision,”
he said. However, internal reviews by the
National Marine Fisheries Service and
Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that
about half the unilateral evaluations by
the Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management that determined that wild-
fire prevention projects were unlikely to
harm protected species were not legally or
scientifically valid. Those had been per-
mitted under the 2003 rule changes.
“This is the fox guarding the hen house.
The interests of agencies will outweigh
species protection interests,” said Eric
Glitzenstein, the attorney representing
environmental groups in the lawsuit over
the wildfire prevention regulations.
“What they are talking about doing is
eviscerating the Endangered Species Act.”

For more information see the Fish
and Wildlife Service (www.fws.gov/
endangered), National Marine Fisheries
Service (www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/laws/esa/),
and the National Wildlife Federation
(www.nwf.org/news).

Dina Cappiello, Associated Press

Man Bitten by 
Gila Monster

On 25 June, a 24-year-old homeless man
who had wandered into the Saguaro
National Park found a Gila Monster
(Heloderma suspectum) and picked it up
because — as he later told rangers — “it
wanted to be friends.” The man then
placed the lizard on his shoulders, where-
upon it promptly bit him on the neck.
While trying to shed the animal, it bit
him once more on the hand. He then
picked it up and wrapped it in a piece of
clothing. A park volunteer encountered
the man walking on a roadway adjacent
to the park and asked if he needed help.
The man told the volunteer what had
happened, then showed him the lizard.

Rangers were summoned; when
they arrived, they found the man vomit-

ing and complaining of difficulty breath-
ing. He was transported by ambulance to
a Tucson area hospital, where he was
admitted for treatment of the bites, heat
exhaustion, and severe dehydration. The
Gila Monster appeared uninjured, and
was returned to the park.

This was the park’s second Gila
Monster incident this year. Gila
Monsters are native to the American
southwest and northern Mexico, and are
the only venomous lizard native to the
United States. These heavy, slow-moving
lizards can grow to two feet in length and
can weigh up to three pounds. Because
of their slowness, they rarely present a
threat to humans.

Bob Love, Chief Ranger, Saguaro
National Park

Gila Monsters (Heloderma suspectum) are the only venomous lizard native to the United States,
but they rarely present a threat to humans. 

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