The lack of DDT is to blame.  Here in Texas when I was a kid, it was reptiles golore.  I'd make my Dad stop every weekend we went to the farm to get a fresh turtle that was crossing the road and let last week's go.  What we didn't see were birds of prey.  This was the height of DDT use - foggers used to drive down our surburban street spraying it by the buttload.  That stopped.

Fast forward 20 years and now in the country all you see are damn hawks.  Here in DAllas, a few miles from downtown, a big-ass one killed my daughter's rabbit.  And at the ranch we've become reptile poor.  I've been looking for another box turtle for a friend for 2 summers (ours is free range in the house and just now waking from winter's hibernation).  Fortunately I've already got a good corn snake, so the dearth of snakes etc. isn't a handicap.  But makes you think ... the same environmentalists that gives us birds takes away our reptiles.  Isn't that in the Bible, too?  Or Shakespeare?  Study those two and you have most of what is worth quoting in English, as long as it is the King James and not some modern translation that rips out the power of obsurifaction. 

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