9:10pm: I'm in the backseat of the Nissan Pathfinder with a beer in my hand and a canebrake rattlesnake in my lap. Of course, the rattlesnake is in a snake bag and the snake bag is in a plastic container. We're heading back to the hotel to call it an early, but exciting night.

7:30pm: I just turned up Route 264 near Lake Mattamuskeet. We spent most of the day driving here, but the hunting has been bad in the middle of the day anyway, so it's the best time to travel. Jim is in the back seat and Mark is the copilot. The sun is low enough in the sky to warm my face, but high enough to heat the blacktop beneath our tires. The day has been a slow one, but our full stomachs give us new hope. There is a big X on our map where a dead canebrake rattlesnake was found in 2000 and that raises our hopes even higher. This is valuable information when looking for herps. It may not have been alive, but it means they do inhabit the area.

I'm still accelerating, just waiting to get to the wooded area several hundred yards ahead, when suddenly we all notice a medium-sized snake coiled near the center of the road. "Pygmy rattlesnake! Pygmy rattlesnake!" I swing to the right of the animal and bring the truck to a full stop as quickly as possibly. Mark leaps from the vehicle with hook in hand, running back down the road like a fox after a rabbit - there are no cars behind us, but a "snake killer" is coming from the other direction. As he reaches the animal, he can't control his excitement. "Canebrake! Canebrake!" One of the prized venomous snakes in North Carolina! He and Jim move it to the safety of the roadside as we break out the snake bag so we can move it to a safer place and photograph it.

We scan the area to make mental notes: the sun is hitting the road here; there is cane on either side of the road; there are canals close by that are filled with brackish water. Another important note is that the snake is swollen with its most recent meal - probably the reason it was sunning itself. They need heat from an external source to help them better digest their food.

Canebrake rattlesnakes are closely related to the timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus horridus) found to the north and west. As a matter of fact, there has been debate as to whether they are the same species, a subspecies, or a completely different species. In Roger Conant's "Reptiles and Amphibians of the Eastern United States" they are listed as a subspecies, Crotalus horridus atricaudatus. They're beautiful snakes, a little more on the reddish-pink side than the timbers, with a dark red line down the back, or sometimes a soft pink one. Adults can reach a length of up to five feet; this one is a young animal at about two feet long. They inhabit the lowland swamps and cane thickets throughout the southeastern US, except for the Florida peninsula.

The day had been a slow one, but this has made up for it a hundred times over. Continuing down the road we found a beautiful ribbon snake that had recently been hit by a car but was still alive, and another small canebrake - this one killed on the edge of the road. It's sad to see so many animals loose their lives on these roads.

By 9:00pm we decide to call it a night so we can get up early, photograph the Canebrake, and release it in a safe spot far from traffic.