ARIZONA DAILY STAR (Tucson) 13 March 08 Goodness snakes - Retired anesthesiologist dedicated to sharing his passion for herpetology (Bonnie Henry)
Tucson, Arizona: He's smuggled snakes on a plane, transplanted radio transmitters into dozens of rattlesnakes and can instantly tell you the difference between a boa constrictor and a Burmese python.
"Pythons lay eggs and boas and their relatives have live young," says Dave Hardy, 73, rattling off just one fact among many he knows about these giants of the snake world.
A retired anesthesiologist and principal founder of the Tucson Herpetological Society, Hardy also has finished up a 20-year stint sticking radio transmitters into blacktail rattlesnakes and then tracking their moves near his summer home in Portal.
"We studied 18 snakes one summer, all with transmitters," says Hardy. "You start out slow. We put one transmitter in a male and a female. All of a sudden, we find the male with another female, so she gets a transmitter, too."
Blacktails, says Hardy, are wonderful. "People think of the rattlesnake as coiled, rattling, striking and biting. But it's defensive."
We'll take his word on "wonderful." Then again, there's probably little Hardy doesn't love about snakes.
Born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was an Army surgeon, young Hardy was keeping boa constrictors in the pathology building at the hospital where his father worked by the time he was in high school.
"I thought I would be a herpetologist," says Hardy, whose family moved to New York City for his final year of high school.
Also along for the trip were a couple of caymans and a hognosed viper Hardy smuggled in among the luggage.
"My dad got them to a curator at the Staten Island Zoo." His father also gave him the old what-will-you-do-with-this-in-your-future talk.
So Hardy enrolled in pre-med at the University of Kansas and became a physician just like his father and grandfather.
Not that he wasn't still smitten by snakes. After winter break in his sophomore year, he flew back to Kansas with a cobra he had gotten from a friendly keeper at the Staten Island Zoo, coiled inside a flat box and snuggled inside Hardy's coat.
The cobra wound up in a terrarium inside a greenhouse at the university — until a professor found out.
"He told me, 'Young man, you've got 24 hours to get rid of it or you are gone.' " Hardy found a grad student who took it home.
After getting his medical degree, Hardy, by then a married man, enlisted in the Army, eventually serving in Korea and then in Hawaii.
"They say they have no snakes there, but they do. They're non-native worm snakes, about seven or eight inches long," says Hardy.
After Hawaii, he and the family came to Tucson, where Hardy joined an anesthesia practice, bought a house and built a snake room beneath it.
He also went to a pet store and bought a boa — one of several he'd own over the years.
Then he started attending herpetological meetings out of town. "That's when I realized I didn't know anything about snakes," says Hardy, who started reading and researching. He's since published numerous articles on the subject.
At one of the meetings he met herpetologist Harry Greene, who'd been inserting transmitters into the large and highly poisonous bushmaster snake in Costa Rica.
Hardy started doing the same thing with Greene in Costa Rica. But he says the work was not successful, citing possible bacterial infection. "It's too hot and humid."
Not a problem for Arizona rattlesnakes, however. "I convinced Harry, 'Let's study rattlesnakes with radio transmitters.' "
At the same time, Hardy was still attending various herpetological meetings — seldom liking what he found.
"Most of them are 'show-and-tell-and-trade-your-pets.' I did not want to allow reptiles at the meetings," he says.
"Your society will fold in three years," one curator told him.
Still, he pressed on. The first official meeting of the Tucson Herpetological Society was held in January of '88.
"It was packed," says Hardy. "A few may not have come back because they couldn't bring their reptiles."
No matter. Today, the society has 165 members — about half of them women — whose professions range from doctors and lawyers to school teachers, grad students and machine shop foremen.
The latter includes Roger Repp, 53, who keeps four snakes and has been a society member almost since its inception.
"It's a strong, research-based society and I give the credit to Dave right from the founding moments," says Repp. "He looked ahead and thought differently."
Says Hardy: "Our mission is conservation, education and research — not talking about our pets."
Incidentally, Hardy has been bitten "many times" by a boa — but never by a rattlesnake.
Retired anesthesiologist dedicated to sharing his passion for herpetology