WFAA (Dallas, Texas) 15 October 05 Timber rattlers: Call of the mild (Ray Sasser, The Dallas Morning News)
Yard, Texas: Bob McFarlane and I were walking along a little-used, sandy road through a dense stand of hardwoods on McFarlane's hunting preserve. The place is called The Big Woods on the Trinity, situated in Anderson County, southeast of Dallas.
The Big Woods is the kind of dark, mysterious place where I like to think that it's still possible to come across a black bear, an ivory-billed woodpecker or the gorgeous snake that was crawling across the road right in front of me.
Luckily, I was watching the ground and spotted the reptile, which blended perfectly with the dead leaves falling from The Big Woods' namesake trees. If I hadn't seen the timber rattler, I would probably have stepped on it.
Not that anything bad probably would have happened, other than scaring the heck out of me and the snake. Timber rattlesnakes, though venomous, are the docile cousins of the Western diamondback and not inclined to bite. Even when threatened by an encroaching photographer, The Big Woods snake seemed reluctant to coil. It rattled a couple of times, the dry buzz barely audible.
The difference between the attitude and sound of the timber rattler compared with the last Western diamondback that I encountered is like the difference between Andy Williams versus Ted Nugent.
The timber rattler, which McFarlane called a velvet tail because of the black, velvet-looking section above the rattles, is about as nonchalant as a rattlesnake can be. The snake's casual personality has no doubt contributed to its rarity. In Texas, the timber rattler is listed as a threatened species and is protected by law.
Such a precarious grip on existence, says U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Craig Rudolph, is because of people. People tend not to like snakes, and people have been killing timber rattlers in East Texas since the first people arrived there.
Nowadays, says Rudolph, the remaining snakes are most likely to fall victim to an automobile.
"What we've found is that the highest snake densities occur in the areas with the least roads," he says. "When you look at a map of East Texas, there are very few of those places remaining."
To make matters worse, squirrels are the preferred food of the timber rattlesnake. As people converted bottomland hardwood forests to pine plantations, reservoirs and cow pastures, squirrels became less abundant. Female timber rattlers only breed once every five years. It's no wonder these snakes are disappearing.
Rudolph has done telemetry tracking studies on timber rattlers and determined that the snake's home range is a relatively large 100 to 200 acres. How many of them exist in East Texas' most densely inhabited 1,000 acres is impossible to say.
"Timber rattlers are very adept at hiding," Rudolph says. "They are ambush predators that spend most of their lives waiting patiently for a small mammal to come within striking range. They have rattles, but they tend not to rattle like other rattlesnakes."
In Rudolph's experience, female timber rattlers are more common than males. That's because males tend to move a lot during the breeding season that occurs from late August until cool fall weather forces the snakes into hibernation. Moving during the mating season increases the male rattlesnake's odds of being hit by a car or truck.
McFarlane usually sees a couple of timber rattlers every year on his 7,500 acres. Most of them are seen as they cross the road. If you see two a year, says Rudolph, that means a healthy population.
Timber rattlers: Call of the mild