Slightly Rattled – The Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake

Not everyone has the good fortune of seeing an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus) in the wild and most are probably content to keep it that way. There’s also a vast difference between spotting one from a vehicle and having one slither across a path in front of you.

The Big Cypress National Preserve in the Western Everglades is home to four species of venomous snakes including the Eastern Diamondback (EDB). On a recent trip down an old logging road, I spotted a four and a half footer winding its way across the road. As I  approached it in the ecotour van, it coiled, rattled and decided to move on. As it slithered past, it raised its neck and head in an S-shape and retreated into the sawgrass prairie where it was lost to my eyes in a matter of seconds.

A few days later I was walking with friends in the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed in Collier County, FL. The area is primarily pine flatwoods with Slash Pines (Pinus elliottii), Saw Palmetto (Serenoa repens) and Cabbage Palms (Sabal palmetto) – perfect EDB habitat. Sliding silently through the underbrush and onto the path several feet in front of us was a massive rattler that without my tape measure I would estimate was nearly six feet long.

It continued on into a Saw Palmetto thicket, coiled up and watched us as we watched it. Rattlers can strike two thirds of their body length which would be about four feet. This means eight feet was as close as I needed to get. The buzz of its rattle validated that thought. EDBs don’t always rattle. Sometimes they remain silent to protect their location and in some cases the rattle may have fallen off.

EDBs are born with a segment at the end of their tail that will develop into a rattle. As snakes grow and scales need to be replaced, the old skin will shed, sometimes several times a year. During each shed, a new segment or “button” becomes loosely attached to the previous segment. The rattle is made of keratin, a fingernail-like substance that is equally fragile and susceptible to breaking over time. The number of segments does not indicate the age of the snake – the birthday does.

The smaller EDB in the top photo has six buttons including the original pear-shaped segment. The biggie in the bottom photos has ten buttons but the final segment is not the original. Either way the alarm system works.

Despite the close encounter on the trail, I was thrilled to have crossed paths with the EDB, even if slightly rattled. 

Thunder Pumpers - The American Bittern

Stick your head in an aquarium and say “glunk-ga-glunk” repeatedly. This was the best description I could offer to a friend who was trying to help me identify the other worldly noise I was hearing coming from just outside my home in Londonderry, VT back in 2002. I had never heard such a sound and if pressed to jump to conclusions I was leaning between a pump going bad or an ET. With flashlight in hand, I circled the house and checked for mechanical malfunctions. I found nothing, but in the distance I could hear the “glunk-ga-glunk” again, far from the house, through a stand of Eastern Hemlock and down towards the edge of Lowell Lake. You’ve seen this movie right? I had to know what it was. In the remaining illumination of twilight, I crept closer to the noise and as I approached the marsh I noticed something standing in the water and waving back in forth like a drunkard on a sailing ship. I flashed the light on it and it flew. Based on the heron-like shape, I believed it was an American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus). Upon returning to the station I looked up their call and sure enough, my spooky mystery noise had been solved.

The name bittern comes from the Latin butire meaning “to cry”. The genus name Botaurus is Latin for “cry of the bull” and they are also known as Thunder Pumpers for their habit of swaying back and forth as they generate the incredible booming sound. The call can be heard for miles but in my case a quarter mile was enough to raise my curiosity.

I didn’t see another bittern until returning to the swamps of South Florida. Even here, the solitary marsh hunter is rarely spotted. As relatives of the herons, they have a similar body shape and a stout, sharp beak that is used for spearing frogs, fish and aquatic invertebrates. When approached they have a unique behavior of “hiding” by extending their neck and beak straight up and playing the part of tall thin aquatic plants. The brown and white streaked upper body parts also help camouflage the bittern. If that isn’t enough they’ll silently sway in the breeze with the vegetation - quite a contrast for a bird that generates such a racket.