TIMES-ENTERPRISE (Thomasville, Georgia) 27 January 08 Roundup nets crowd - 154 rattlers collected for annual festival (Alan Mauldin)
Whigham: It was a brutal afternoon for man and reptile alike Saturday at the 48th annual rattlesnake roundup in Whigham.
A decent crowd braved the cold, rainy day, however, to get a glimpse of — and in some instances touch — the creatures whose tell-tale sound effects can strike fear in the hearts of most people.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever touched a snake,” said Jackie Booth of Watkinsville after touching a snake held aloft by LaRue Sheffield of Broxton. Booth, a third-grade teacher at Westminster Christian Academy in the area visiting relatives, said her students dared her to touch one of the snakes. “I told my class I was going to do this.”
Snake numbers were also down this year, with 154 collected this year, compared to 209 for 2007. The biggest year for the roundup was 1995, when there were 610 snakes, with the lowest total coming in 1974 with 106 snakes.
The drought may have played a role in the decline, said Barry Strickland, who was tallying the weights of snakes to determine prize winners for the event. Strickland added that this was only a guess.
He was more certain about deer-hunting seasons.
“They keep extending deer season,” he said. “There’s more and more land (rattlesnake hunters) can’t hunt until hunting season’s over.”
The Tommy Cobb Family took top honors in 2008 for the largest snake at 7.55 pounds. The largest snake in the festival’s history was one weighing 15 pounds, two ounces in 1976.
Tommy Lancos collected the most of the reptiles with 75, followed by Tommy Lee Cobb’s 29. Nearly all of the snakes were Eastern diamondbacks, with one timber rattlesnake in the bunch.
Ken Darnell of Bioactive Laboratories, who has been coming to the event for 30 years, said that the number of snakes captured is dropping because snake hunters in Georgia are a dying breed.
“Young people don’t do it because it’s hard work,” he said.
Darnell said that the numbers of snakes taken in Georgia’s two rattlesnake roundups, the second being in Claxton, are not sufficient to have a negative impact on rattler populations overall.
A third roundup in Fitzgerald was transformed in 2001 into a wild chicken festival.
“There is no shortage of these snakes,” Darnell said. “If there were I would have nothing to do with these things.”
Depleted numbers is among the charges leveled at rattlesnake roundup events by groups such as the Humane Society of the United States. Others include cruelty to snakes, environmental damage to the environment by hunters who pour gasoline into gopher tortoise holes that are rattlesnakes’ winter homes, and risks to humans who trap the snakes.
Darnell said that it is illegal to use gasoline in gopher tortoise in the state, and that no studies have shown that the practice ever killed the tortoises.
The study of snake venom has also been instrumental in developing blood-clotting and diabetes medications, he said.
“We still have more hunters here than anywhere else in Georgia,” he said.
Roundup nets crowd - 154 rattlers collected for annual festival

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