Reporter's notebook - Give rattlesnake a fair shake

How do you feel about rattlesnakes? Whether your answer is yea or nay, you’re in decent company, according to a local scholar on the iconic reptile.

Steven Pitts came to Eastern New Mexico University four years ago for graduate school by way of Tennessee, where 12 years back he had his first encounter with a species of the venomous snake and has been fascinated ever since.

“It was incredibly mesmerizing,” he said. “It was the first and only Timber rattlesnake I ever got to hear in the wild; as far as I know it’s still rattling to this day.”

As a grad student, his “main research was investigating people’s attitudes towards rattlesnakes,” he explained to The News. And what did he find?

“As I suspected, it was overall negative — but it wasn’t as lopsidedly negative as I anticipated,” he said. “There’s a little bit of hope there. I think it was around 35, 40 percent of people were sort of leaning on the positive side, which I thought was astronomically high.”

His surprise is understandable, given the unsavory reputation of the serpentine kind and the real dangers it can pose to those who might tramp indelicately through the sand or grasslands. In a Texas town not too far from here, locals make an annual festival of rounding up rattlers en masse and bravely murdering them by the thousands.

That’s not a practice Pitts would endorse, pointing out the important role the snakes have in their ecosystem with rodent population control. Still, he acknowledged “they don’t mix too well” with children or the elderly, “but for the folks in between, I believe it’s just about paying attention to your surroundings more.”

Of more than 30 rattlesnake species between Canada and southern Argentina, three can be found in a half-hour diameter of Clovis and Portales: the Prairie rattlesnake, the Desert massasauga and the old favorite Western diamondback.

Now with a degree in biology, Pitts’ next project is to make a video documentary of every known rattlesnake species, preferably taking much of the footage himself. That would entail some travel, but he hopes to keep New Mexico as a home base.

— Compiled by Staff Writer David Grieder