POST AND COURIER (Charleston, S Carolina) 22 May 06 In search of an agent of venom - Eastern diamondbacks usually docile, but can kill with 1 quick strike (Bo Petersen)
Green Pond: Jayme Waldron steps jauntily through the longleaf savannah grasses, lifting the radio receiver antenna like a parasol. Her prey is an eastern diamondback rattlesnake, the dread mammoth of the forest floor.
The diamondback can grow to more than 6 feet long and as thick around as a small tree trunk. It strikes twice as quickly as a major league fastball, and its venom kills nearly half the people who are severely bitten. Just the suggestion that one might be around makes a lot of people's skin crawl.
Waldron wears her sunglasses up on her fishing hat, a nice white blouse, Timberland boots. The researcher is after "Sam," whom she named for the veterinarian who installed the snake's radio transmitter; she says names are easier to remember than the 10-digit identification numbers.
Sam is nearly 5 feet long and as thick around as a muscled forearm.
Waldron is studying "translocation as a mitigation tool."
"Can you move a diamondback? Are they going to find their way home?" she asks. Those are good questions - snakes have a home range, and if taken out of it they can starve themselves struggling to get back. In the late summer breeding season, a rattler might travel a mile or more in a night, but the next night will return to where it was.
"People think they are stupid. They don't wander around aimlessly. They know where they are."
Waldron hopes to move and track 20 snakes in the state's Donnelley Wildlife Management Area in the ACE Basin and across four cooperating plantations nearby. It's part of study designed to show how well diamondbacks tolerate being displaced, and whether individual diamondbacks can be relocated from areas where they are pressured to longleaf preserves where the threatened species can prosper.
The "Don't Tread On Me" snake was the first symbol for the United States, the "first bald eagle," as volunteer helper Shane Welch says. It has been disappearing along with its longleaf pine coastal habitat to development and slaughter. It is listed in South Carolina as a species of concern.
The diamondback is an important link in the health of its ecosystem, eating rodents and being eaten by non-venomous snakes, red-tailed hawks, great horned owls and other animals. But it's not easy to sell the protection of a species to people who for generations have stomped it, chopped it apart, shot it or dynamited it.
Sam Seashole, a Berkeley County veterinarian who volunteers by implanting the transmitters for Waldron and for whom "Sam" is named, calls the diamondback a keystone animal.
"There are few forms of life is South Carolina more impressive than the eastern diamondback. This is a magnificent animal. When we lose him, we lose a large part of the Lowcountry, because the diamondback's habitat is a vital part of what makes this place."
Despite the myth of its ferocity and "it came out of nowhere" horror stories of rattler attacks, the diamondback is docile, secretive, even shy. Two of three rattlers Waldron tracks down on a recent morning remain passively coiled as she uncovers them; Sam, after a minute, slinks away down a hole. They don't even rattle.
"Oh yeah, they're vicious," Waldron says facetiously. "Sometimes when you try to mess with them they hide their heads under their tails." She has gotten attached to her snakes. She is - creepy-crawly as it sounds - passionate about the eastern diamondback.
"I feel sorry for snakes," she says. "Predators often get a bad name. It drives me crazy that a lot of these species are declining and there isn't a lot you can do about it because they're snakes. And I don't think I'm wrong to say that if they had fur or feathers people would be upset about it."
Waldron is working for the University of Georgia with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources in the cooperative study. She started out wanting to research birds, then salamanders. But snakes intrigue her. Their behaviors are intelligent and individual enough to be almost personalities.
During the recent tracking, she takes a small side trip to get a look at an alligator in a mudflat. The Jeep spooks feral pig, wild turkey, fox squirrel and hawks.
But when a coachwhip zips across the dirt road - a snake as long as the road is wide - she whoops, brakes and tries to chase it down. Stooping to pick up a tiny, rare oak toad while tracking one of the diamondbacks, she spots what might be a rare Southern hognose snake and picks it up to "archive" with photographs.
She is used to being thought odd. People lean from their trucks when she's out in the savannah to ask if she's "the snake lady." Then they tell her, "You're nuts."
A diamondback ready to be implanted with a transmitter lies coiled in the back of her Jeep in a cooler with a hand-printed, red ink warning sign that reads "Hot!!"
Out among the longleaf and the red coral bean wildflowers, the receiver begins chirping more insistently.
Waldron turns to the people accompanying her and says, "You guys stay there a second." She needn't have; they are stopped dead still. Sam is found coiled in among pine cones, but he is virtually indistinguishable from them. Even as big as he is, if you look away he can't be immediately picked out again when you look back.
"Cryptic," Welch says. That camouflage ability alone might account for the snake's attack reputation. People sit on them unaware, put a hand down by them.
Surrounded by bigger creatures, Sam is unperturbed. He barely looks up.
"Sam is a gentleman; he's just not a fighter," Waldron says. "The snakes are used to large creatures walking by them. You've got to figure deer walk by snakes every day."
Waldron has been circled by males trying to mate with a female she tracked. She has half-stepped on eastern diamondbacks, and gently pulled back unbitten. But she doesn't do the implants, she says with a small grin. She leaves that to the vet.
"How dogs get bit, how people get bit, they mess with them. I'm not saying people could walk up and grab one," she said. "You've just got to stay very alert. There's no room for getting distracted."
The eastern diamondback
--Is the longest, heaviest and one of the most venomous snakes in North America and the largest rattlesnake in the world; the biggest adults have reached 8 feet long and weighed 15 pounds.
--Is found in pineland, wiregrass, oak woods and lowland palmetto.
--Hunts by lying camouflaged along rodent trails and ambushing small prey. Has pit sensors that detect infrared heat waves. It strikes, then follows scent trails until animal dies.
--Is considered abundant in some places but declining across its range; listed as a species of concern in South Carolina.
--Is threatened by the loss of longleaf pine habitat, roadkill, over-collection for meat and leather, and indiscriminate killing.
In search of an agent of venom

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