A doctoral candidate from Boston. A livestock veterinarian from Minnesota. A teacher from Pennsylvania. All have converged on the historic hamlet of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on this soft May morning for a single reason: because the Magician lives here, and the Magician has said that the signs are good.
The Magician is famous among the cognoscenti for his ability to make the Glowworm appear. Go to the Magician, it is said, and you cannot fail to encounter it. What’s more, the worm will do you no harm. Its bite always misses in the presence of the Magician.
Everyone wants to see the Glowworm in its glory, but no one wants to get bitten by it.
The Glowworm, Crotalus horridus, is the timber rattlesnake, the Moby Dick of eastern reptiles. The Magician is W. H. Martin, a former southern dirt farmer turned naturalist who is widely recognized as one of the most knowledgeable and accomplished snake hunters in the Appalachians. Just as Darwin cultivated stockmen and pigeon breeders for their familiarity with the mysterious laws of inheritance, biologists interested in rattlesnakes have beaten a path to Martin’s door. Much of what he knows isn’t available in libraries.
Snake finding is Martin’s passion. He has refined it into a modern, analytic obsession with mapping and counting, the spadework of population biology. currently he is working on a two-year rattler census for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. One reason his work is of interest to zoologists and state conservation offices is its novelty. Unlike bald eagles or grizzly bears, snakes are maddeningly difficult to count, and hence the baseline data from which population trends can be abstracted are hard to come by. In general, snakes do not mark territories, leave distinctive signs, or even show themselves aboveground with any frequency, so a patch of woods where snakes are abundant may be practically indistinguishable from one where they are absent.
