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LANCASTER NEW ERA (Pennsylvania) 17 August 05 Snake-bit - Local duo scales state's mountains to locate, and help, rattlesnakes. (Ad Crable)
Lancaster County, PA: Jason Gehman was clearly nervous.
We’d pedaled mountain bikes on a mountain crest north of Lebanon to three of his favorite spots for finding eastern timber rattlesnakes without seeing a single scale.
Gehman had peered under rocks with flashlights, turned others over, and nothing.
Fears of the worst that could happen started infecting his thoughts. What if some yahoo had bumbled onto the snake dens and wiped out the reptiles in a blaze of misguided antipathy? What if snake hunters had located his secret lairs and made off with them?
When his stealthy approach found no rattlers lolling in the early morning sun near a den he had created by stacking boulders in a forest clearing, the 47-year-old Lititz man began a last-ditch traipse through the ferns in the clearing.
“Here’s one!”
Indeed, parting the ferns like curtains, Gehman unveiled a hefty eastern timber rattlesnake stretched out on a rock, basking its cold blood in the sun. Though we were only several feet from it, the snake seemed oblivious, or uncaring, of our presence.
Gehman admired it for a minute or so, then gently lifted it up at mid-body with a snake hook. The reptile hardly seemed to mind.
***
Twenty years ago, Gehman was a hard-core rattlesnake hunter, plucking snakes from their homes and dashing off to a fire hall in a competitive urge to win snake roundups around the state. Afterward, he’d often sell the rattlers to pharmaceutical companies.
It’s still legal — again Pennsylvania stands out — to capture or kill one rattlesnake a year with a $5 permit from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.
The roundups, often to benefit fire companies, have been banished in many states but are still held in Pennsylvania, including the one at Muddy Run Recreation Park last weekend.
“I hate snake hunts, hate them,” hisses Gehman, who owns a carpet and upholstery business. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever did,” he says, still slightly disbelieving of his youthful transgressions.
“I haven’t killed or relocated a snake in 30 years.”
What led to his radical change of heart was that after several years he began seeing fewer and fewer snakes at the spots he was raiding. He began researching and found that a female rattler does not even begin to reproduce until 7 to 11 years old.
And snakes, even if they are returned to wild after a roundup, may be doomed if not released back to almost the same spot they were taken.
It was an epiphany that literally changed his life.
Today, Gehman and another rattlesnake preservationist convert, Jerry Bruckhart of Manheim, spend nearly every summer weekend walking or biking into some of Pennsylvania’s most rugged mountains to locate rattlesnakes and improve habitat for crucial den and gestation sites.
For the past three years, they have been the only two people permitted by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to doctor the forest on the snakes’ behalf at dozens of den sites in the vast Tioga State Forest in northcentral Pennsylvania.
“”That’s why I do the habitat work,” says Gehman, still contrite decades later after his snake-hunting days. “I’m trying to make amends.”
Previously, Gehman traipsed the River Hills of southern Lancaster County, improving conditions around dens of copperheads.
Gehman and Bruckhart take their volunteer mission seriously, sometimes lugging a chainsaw or digging bar several miles to clear trees that are beginning to shade a sunning spot.
Sun is crucial to the survival of the cold-blooded rattlers although too much will kill them.
The sun’s warming rays to digest food and incubate eggs inside females.That’s why den sites are often on ridgetops.
The snakes favor small openings in the woods. Without human help, many of these ideal spots are swallowed up by the forest over time. That’s where Gehman and Bruckhart come in.
The duo also take along a 7-pound tool that looks like a wrecking bar to lift rocks and create crevices. Perfect dens are rocks or log piles with a 1-inch or so opening where the snakes can seek refuge in a hurry, like when owls and hawks dive from above or a coyote is snooping around. Den sites also need small shrubs nearby under which the snakes blend in.
The men drive up to Gehman’s family cabin on Friday evenings, put in a 14-hour day on Saturdays and a half-day on Sundays before heading home.
***
Timber rattlers are found from east Texas to southern Wisconsin and from north Florida to New Hampshire. They are considered endangered or threatened in the Northeast, except in Pennsylvania.
Here, Curt Brennan, a DCNR field technician studying rattlesnakes, figures the rattlers are holding their own in the heavily forested northcentral mountains. He thinks in other areas prone to highways and development, the rattler is probably losing ground.
Their bite is seldom fatal to humans and your chances of being bitten by one, unless you pick it up or harass it, are less than being struck by a bolt of lightning.
As part of his work, Gehman has handled hundreds of rattlers to determine their gender, color phase and length.
Never has he been bitten, though on occasion one will deliver a strike to the special snake-proof leather boots he wears under his jeans up almost his knee as he restrains the reptile. Even then, the snake usually delivers a “false bite” that does not release venom.
“They don’t want to deal with you,” he notes. “Most of the time after they see humans, they just lay there. The most dangerous part of rattlesnake work is driving to get there.”
Yet the snakes’ most dangerous natural enemy is man, who persists in killing them out of a senseless primal fear or for morbid curiosity.
The 39-year-old Bruckhart, a self-employed construction worker who fell in with Gehman after meeting him trapping one day, once found a dead yellow-phase rattlesnake that had been killed for no other reason that hatred and for its rattles.
He left the carcass along the trail with a note with these words: A giant monument to ignorance.”
Even deep in these woods a 90-minute drive from Lancaster, the rattlers aren’t safe.
He’s found rocks overturned by those searching for the snakes. Gehman forbid me from publishing what county we were in.
His boss at DCNR, Brennan, doesn’t even ask Gehman and Bruckhart where they find snake dens.
***
As the heat begins to bear down, Gehman stands in the ferns with a can of automotive spray paint in one hand the the tail of a rattler with nine rattles and one button in the other.
The 5-year-old female snake’s head is pinned gently to the ground by Gehman’s boot. (He refuses to hold the snake by the head lest he hurt it.)
Gehman sprays the tails of all the snakes he catches and processes so he can tell whether he has seen it before. The color codes also help affix an age. This year’s color is yellow.
After the spray painting, Gehman calmly lifts his boot and steps back. The snake slides away.
Gehman calls after it, “Have a good life. Stay off the trail and have a lot of little ones.”
A few minutes later, he discovers an old PVC pipe buried under the ferns. He turns it vertical and tells me to put my ear to it.
I hear an agitated buzz and Gehman grins. He starts shaking the pipe gently and finds two rattlesnakes and a copperheads.
After a rocky start, we will tally seven copperheads and three rattlers by lunch.
“There’s absolutely no machismo involved,” Gehman says when asked about what satisfaction he gets from toiling on behalf of rattlers.
“I’m not a snake freak. I don’t keep snakes or go to (herpetology) shows.
“I think it’s because they are unique. They’ve evolved with venom to kill things.”
For Bruckhart, it’s the call of the wild.
“They are one of the last vestiges of wilderness we have left. We’ve destroyed the grizzly bear and the mountain lion.
“When you see a rattlesnake, you know you’re in somewhat of a remote area because they don’t survive around people.”
Local duo scales state's mountains to locate, and help, rattlesnakes

thanks Wes!

Rich