TIMES-UNION (Albany, New York) 07 September 06 A team project has some bite - Bethlehem student, Malta naturalist track slithering natives in the name of science (Marc Parry)
Saratoga Springs: The Eastern hognose snake gets a bad rap.
Sure, it flattens its neck like a cobra, hisses really loudly and strikes violently like it's going to bite you.
Maybe its rear fangs pack a little venom -- enough to subdue a small toad.
But what's a little venom compared with such an adorable upturned snout?
"It's hard to call a snake cute," said Malta naturalist Kenneth Barnett. "But they're cute."
He's biased about that, being the kind of guy who spends his spare time hunting for rattlesnakes.
And these days, hognose snakes.
Under a mentoring project, Barnett and a student from the Lab School at Bethlehem High School are tracking the serpents in Saratoga County and the Albany Pine Bush Preserve.
The health center of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, surgically implanted a transmitter so they could follow a broomstick-thick female known as Snake 001. What started as a modest study is in its second year and has led to a collaboration with a well-known biologist.
Barnett and his pupil, 16-year-old Bryant Abbuhl, have been studying how the snakes deal with different ecosystems. But they might have discovered new information about the snakes' ability to eat potentially toxic newts -- specifically, whether they've developed a resistance to tetrodotoxin, a potent toxin also found in puffer fish.
"At this point it's an interesting observation, and now we have to determine what it all means," said Edmund Brodie, a biology professor at Utah State University and expert in the snake-newt "arms race," who is studying Barnett's snakes and newts.
One night last week, Barnett and Abbuhl pulled over next to a wooded street corner in a residential section of Saratoga Springs, surrounded by the homes of jockeys and doctors. It hadn't stopped raining all day, but a sprinkler watered the lawn of an empty mansion across the street.
The pair waded into a mishmash of white pine and scrub oak and Virginia creeper, armed with a receiver and what looked like a giant television antenna. Abbuhl wore shorts, showing how little the hognose snakes scared this teen with a passion for "venomous stuff."
Barnett switched on the receiver, which beeped.
"That's her," he said.
The snake was coiled up somewhere in the brush. The closer Barnett and Abbuhl got to it, the louder the receiver beeped.
Barnett, who by day works as a pesticide control specialist for the state, usually finds the snake within minutes.
This evening, Abbuhl found the first clue when he reached down and picked up the staple of her diet: a nickel-sized toad.
And there she was. Thirty-two inches of coiled reptile, black and gold, nose like a built-in plow, the snake lay low under some shrubs waiting for dinner to hop by.
Barnett picked her up, which made her act exactly as he said she would -- a harmless charade of intimidation that often scares people into killing such snakes.
She hissed. Her tongue shot out. Her neck hooded like a cobra's. She squirted foul fluids.
"How cool is that, man?" said Barnett, 47, more animated than his teenage pupil. "Our own cobra!"
It wasn't always so quick.
In their first year, the two went hognose hunting at least 30 times. Their find? Nothing. They feared the second year would flop, too.
Eventually, they found six snakes to study: three in the Pine Bush, and three between Saratoga and Wilton. One pregnant hognose turned up on a Saratoga porch, sunbathing.
Barnett and Abbuhl have developed a bond over their hunting adventures, which included a trip to Costa Rica -- one of the "snakiest" places in the world.
Abbuhl wants to study reptiles. Barnett collects lizards and snakes to use in education programs. They learned about the hognose snakes' taste for newts from naturalists at the Ndakkina Education Center outside Saratoga Springs.
The reptiles are some of the most common snakes in the Pine Bush, but the study is the first to look at their behavior there. While their venom would cause a "slight irritation" to a human, they generally don't bite, said Conservation Director Neil Gifford. "I think they're probably one of the most interesting animals in the preserve," he said. "Here's this snake that on first appearance seems incredibly aggressive, and the whole thing is a bluff."
A team project has some bite