Timber Rattlesnakes - Crotalus horridus

I started collecting venomous snakes when I was still in Junior High School, hiding the cages in my bedroom closest. I think the attraction was pretty simple. Despite all of the exotic animals around the house, hot snakes terrified everybody else in my family. In high school I met several guys from the Staten Island Zoo who made an annual trek to South Carolina to collect Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes, trips chronicled in Carl Kauffeld's book The Keeper & The Kept. I got to tag along. As Director of the Staten Island Zoo Mr. Kauffeld managed to display all of the native forms of Crotalids found in North America. Only Jim Murphy reptile boss at Dallas Zoo in the 1980's managed to put together a similar collection. Studying ethology in Gainesville is was natural that I decided to focus on fieldwork looking at reproduction in Crotalus horridus, The Timber Rattlesnake, found widely in the northeast and pockets of the midwest. Beginning in the 1950s volunteer fire departments in rural Pennsylvania would hold annual "Rattlesnake Roundups" collecting timber rattlesnakes and awarding prizes to hunters who captured the the biggest snakes and the most snakes. Some roundups would collect as many as 400 rattlers in a single day. By 1980 the Pennsylvania Fish Commission became concerned that roundups were endangering threaten C. horridus populations. Several herpetologists were contracted to study the hunts, and as part of the project I began to commute to PA from New York City on weekends in June (when the roundups were held) to assist in measuring and sexing the snakes, and to return the animals to the sites where they were collected by hunters after the competition had ended. I worked at the Bronx Zoo then, so getting back into the field with a stipend from the Fish Commission was a pleasure. Eventually Pennsylvania set strict limits on the number of snakes collected by the round-ups, and specific protections were added for gravid females. The last time I visited a roundup was 1990. I was living in California then after several years in Honduras and my wife Sharee wanted to see what the roundups were about. I'm pretty sure that day in June was the one and only time an Aussie woman with corn-rowed hair entertained the roundup crowd tail-walking large rattlesnakes around the "snake pit" and posing for pictures. But then as she said, she'd kept brown snakes and tiger snakes and taipans in her closet growing up. Today she lives in Cairns, in Queensland reworking the taxonomy of seasnakes. I bring all of this up because although I think rattlesnake roundups were and are somewhat detrimental to rattlesnake conservation, I still believe that animal shows presented by people who actually know what they're talking about remain important. Popular science is not evil, and education can be wonderfully subversive when presented in the guise of entertainment whether the animals are mammals, or avians, or herps. Sometimes I think that zoos have lost their way when they cease to attempt to entertain. Likewise I wonder about the circus menagerie that fails to educate. As an animal guy whether I'm leading a camel, or scraping feces from a cat cage, or playing with a croc, I'd like to think that the people who are watching will leave knowing something about that animal that they didn't know before. Because then maybe they'll care about that animal. Anyway it's almost June again, and in Pennsylvania the timber rattlesnakes are moving away from their winter den sites. The quintessential American viper still reminding those who pass by, "Don't tread on me."