STAR PRESS (Muncie, Indiana) 23 July 06 Caged snake encounters rattle his composure (John Carlson)
Did you hear that Hoosier naturalists are hoping the establishment of a wetland adjacent to a park near Fort Wayne will provide habitat for the Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake, a threatened species that may or may not still be in that area?
This is fine with me.
While not a snake lover, I'm all for helping native species thrive. Besides, by all accounts, this one is a docile critter as venomous vipers go, one you must practically invite to bite.
No, based on my experience, it's captured rattlers that are the scary ones.
The first I ever encountered was back in the 1980s on Walnut Plaza, when the city used to host the Renaissance Fair.
Remember that?
Being a celebration of the Renaissance, lots of folks -- guys included -- flounced around downtown in tights, spouting Olde English words like "make haste," "hither" and "thou peasant," as in, "Make haste hither, thou peasant, with my kielbasa sandwich."
So there I was standing at Ye Olde Sausage Stand, waiting for my lunch, when some little vandal walked up and noisily slammed a small glass case down beside me on the counter.
This was immediately followed by a very angry rattle and the squeaking of a terrified mouse.
That mouse, of course, was me when I swung around to find a very short-tempered rattlesnake, glaring at me from behind the glass.
Suddenly, I realized why Renaissance guys wore tights.
It was because when people slammed rattlesnakes down beside them on lunch counters, tights clung to their butts much better than pants as they hopped around like wussies.
My other encounter came years ago in an exotic pet store here, where I went to do a feature story on the squirmy critters for sale.
Some very big hairy fellows were running it and invited me to stroll alone in the storage room while they took care of some business up front.
Walking around I discovered scores of turtles, lizards and other assorted squiggling things. Bending to get a close-up look at the wildlife inside these glass cases, I was peering intently from one to another when I suddenly stopped short.
Peering back at me just as intently from behind a small glass panel, about four inches from my nose, were three of the perkiest little rattlesnakes you'd ever want to see.
It struck me then that, had these serpents been of the species identified in Latin as rattlesnakeus glassbreakus, I'd have been stumbling into the showroom with all three of the little fellas swinging from my face.
Admittedly, this would have been lousy publicity for the pet store.
As it turned out, though, the very big hairy guys couldn't have cared less, because they were undercover state conservation officers running this store in a sting meant to arrest people who bought illegal reptiles as pets.
Anyway, when it comes to rattlesnakes, I'll take mine in the wild.
Caged snake encounters rattle his composure