Rattlesnakes, Little Brothers and Boy Scouts

Susan and I and our running buddies frequent an old Army base here in Monterey, California called Fort Ord, where there are numerous closed roads and lots of running trails where the firing ranges used to be, and lately there have been a lot of rattlesnakes around.  Hari saw one sunning on the pavement halfway up one of our favorite hills (and photographed it on the cell phone he never runs without), and Gary and Rob have seen several, and also one kingsnake, which is a harmless snake (but don’t call them harmless if you’re talking to a rattlesnake—more on that in a minute).  I was running behind Kate once when she almost stepped on one.  She has a good eye:  she saw it,  yelped and stopped dead, but the result was that I smacked into her back and almost sent us both tumbling onto the creature.

But as you can probably guess, I’m the guy who actually enjoys seeing a poisonous snake.  I’m also the guy who’s actually been bitten by one, proving either that I don’t harbor grudges, or that I don’t learn from my mistakes.

I was eleven years old, and he bit me because I picked him up to see if he was poisonous.

So when you’re done laughing, please read on, because it was not quite as stupid as that makes it sound.  You see, he was crawling under my little brother Byron, who was in a tire swing, and was age five.  That’s not so cool, I said to myself.  We were visiting North Carolina and everyone had been warning us about poisonous snakes.  I needed to get the snake out of there, but it was twilight and I couldn’t tell what he was, and I didn’t want to kill an “innocent” snake—so I picked him up.  I had read a lot of nature books and I knew how to pick up a poisonous snake, and I did so, correctly and successfully, grabbing him right behind the head like you’re supposed to, and I carried him into the light to identify him.

What I didn’t count on was his strength.  He wasn’t even a big snake—maybe two feet long—but man, was he powerful!  In the end he was too much for my eleven-year-old hand, and he broke his head free from under my thumb and nailed me.

The family scene that followed was somewhere in that magical space that exists between Three Stooges and Keystone Cops.  A doctor later said that the only intelligent thing that happened that night was when my older brother Gary, who was a Boy Scout, did the obvious Boy Scout thing and put a tourniquet on me (they don’t recommend that anymore).  My mom at one point actually had me drawing pictures of it next to the reptile book for ten or so precious minutes, trying to identify it (we didn’t have the snake—I’d gotten mad and frightened and hurled him into the woods), and we never did ID the thing (it was probably a copperhead), but we got to the part in the book about how poisonous snakes leave two fang marks instead of a U-shaped row, and we looked down at my finger and said, “Yep.”  That was when the venom hit me.

Three minutes later I was screaming at the top of my lungs as my dad careened wildly through the streets of Chapel Hill toward the hospital in our VW microbus.  I can’t remember the pain.  I just remember the screaming.  They say the mind will not recreate a memory of pain.  (Susan speculates it’s because the birth rate would plummet if women could remember the sensation of childbirth with any clarity, but that’s material for some other article.)

Anyway, obviously I lived, but it was a bit of a close one.  I tested allergic to the antivenom, which is a concotion of horse antibodies that will kill you summarily if you’re allergic to horses.  The test is unreliable, though, so when it was clear I was going to die anyway, they went ahead and gave it to me, and I got lucky.

But here are some things you might not know about rattlesnakes:

• They’re not out to get you.  They just get cranky when someone tromps on them.  They know you’re not food, and they want to avoid you.  They only bite because they get stepped on by runners or picked up by eleven-year-olds who have read too many nature books.  Unfortunately, they, like many snakes, like to sun themselves (“thermal-regulate”) in the middles of trails or on nice warm asphalt, so they do get stepped on (they also get run over a lot).
• They’re not even particularly mean, as predators go.  They inflict a quick death by lethal injection, which is really pretty humane when compared to, for instance, my very sweet and very cute kitty-cat, who will grievously mutilate a mouse and then play with it for twenty minutes.
• They can control how much venom they inject, and when they bite defensively, about forty percent of the time they inject none at all.  These are called dry strikes, and they explain a lot of superstitions about why one person will be affected by a snake bite and another will not.  Venom is expensive stuff for them to produce, and they don’t waste it.  But the catch is that that kind of self-control only comes when they’re older.  The young ones are not able to regulate it, and the one I was handling was young, so I got hammered.  The moral here is that if you do step on a rattlesnake, you want to hope it’s a nice BIG one!
• About 8,000 people per year get bitten, and of them, only about five die.  Apparently it was somewhat unusual that I had such a close brush.
• Many people get bitten because they underestimate the striking distance the snake is capable of.  They can strike something two thirds of their body length away,  and they do not need to be coiled, and they do not even need to draw back first.  Worth keeping in mind.
• When they strike, their jaws, which are unhinged like most snakes’ jaws are, open so far that the upper and lower jaws are vertical and the fangs are sticking horizontally out at the prey.  Really it’s more like being speared than being bitten.
• But they’re bad shots, which makes me laugh for some reason.  I’m not sure why–it just strikes me funny.  Often they completely miss something the size of a wood rat, and he gets away.
• They’re called pit vipers in reference to the small pits between their nostrils and their eyes.  These are thermal sensors which they use to detect warm-blooded animals nearby.  They can detect a difference of half a degree farenheit.
• The rattlesnake doesn’t have many predators, but one is the kingsnake.  The kingsnake is into eating other snakes, even other kingsnakes, which works for him because when you swallow your prey whole, which all snakes do, it’s nice if it’s shaped like you are.  They are not immune to the rattlesnake venom, but they have a pretty good tolerance to it (so do opossums and hedgehogs).  Kingsnakes are constrictors, which means they kill their prey by looping around it and squeezing it to death (now, that’s a gruesome way to go!).  Apparently they are quick enough to subdue the rattlesnake usually without getting nailed.  At the height of the combat the two of them are just a tight, fist-like ball of snake coils, and it’s hard to tell who’s doing what to whom, but it’s the rattlesnake who is succumbing.  Then when he’s, well, not dead maybe, but not causing trouble anymore, the kingsnake swallows him.  Head-first.

• Some people have been lucky enough to see two rattlesnakes doing a beautiful and mysterious dance, in which they weave upward, getting half their body lengths in the air, and face off and lean around each other in ritualistic moves (see the photo above).  People assume it’s a mating dance.  Well, yes and no:  It’s actually two males in mating combat.  They never bite each other—evolution usually (though not always) discourages same-species adversaries killing each other—but one will be driven off eventually.  But hey, there’s an easier way for a male to get his genes into the pool:  sometimes while two males are locked in combat, a third is several feet away in the bushes whooping it up with the female.  Scientists call this the “sneaky male strategy”.

Now you know.