New survey finds Pennsylvania rattlesnake populations waning

October 11, 2009

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — by Terry McCormick

The buzzing was loud … and close.

Matt Wilson quickly glanced downward and spotted the source. A timber rattlesnake lay curled only a few feet away in the knee-high, wild huckleberry patch where he and his wife Paula were hiking.

“I heard another buzz and looked down by my boot,” he said. “One was right beside it. Two more were right in front of me. We decided to move into the woods. We almost never see snakes without nearby rocks for them to escape under. It was very unusual. Just when you think you know everything about them, they confound you.”

Despite the occasional confounding, the husband and wife team from Smethport, Pa., had a busy summer this year fulfilling assessment requests from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s Timber Rattlesnake Site Assessment and Inventory Project. The project’s goal is to check the nearly 600 known rattlesnake den sites in the state, while assessing the health and status of the overall population of the reptile, which in Pennsylvania is a “candidate species’ for listing as threatened or endangered. Read more »

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