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The History of Snowflake

A Pure White Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, Crotalus adamanteus

Snowflake, my prized eastern diamondback rattlesnake Crotalus adamanteus, was caught as a juvenile, crawling across Mapp Road in Palm City, Martin County, Florida USA, September 19, 1975. The original captor was Dave Betham and two construction worker friends on lunch break. The guys guided it into a toolbox using a tire iron, at which she struck repeatedly. They knew it was something unique, but didn’t know who would want it.

After work about 4:00pm, they called the local Environmental Center in Jensen Beach, Florida, the area’s closest nature center at the time, and asked if they’d like to have the unusual snake. Jay Jarrett, the director, explained that they only kept marine creatures on display, and suggested they call me, Bill Love. Jay knew me from snake talks I’d given there while still in high school, and figured I’d know who'd want such an odd specimen.

When I got the call, the men said they had a “solid white rattlesnake” and gave the details of the capture. At first I was hesitant to believe them. Keep in mind that no one, including me, was used to seeing aberrant snakes popping up like they do so often in the pet trade nowadays. Soon I realized they did apparently have a small white rattler, but I still couldn’t tell from their description if it was an adult pigmy rattler Sistrurus miliarius barbouri or a young diamondback Crotalus adamanteus. I then offered to come and pick it up (for fear they’d never find my home), but they insisted on delivering it to me. They wanted to see my reptile collection since the day’s find had piqued their interest in snakes. Waiting for them to get to my home was the most suspenseful 30 minutes of my life!

They arrived and showed me the snake that was still in their toolbox. I hooked it out and into a clean aquarium to look it over. It was definitely an eastern diamondback, about 20 inch (51 cm) long, with pure bright white scales and skin, and bluish-grey eyes. Looking back at my notes, I may have just estimated the length because newborn C. adamanteus are usually more like 14" long. It was unlikely that it had already survived for a year and was already a small yearling when found because creatures that normally depend on their cryptic coloration seldom elude predators in nature that long. There was absolutely no trace of a pattern of any kind, unlike the buff, cream, or yellowish diamond markings that grace all the amelanistic western diamondbacks Crotalus atrox in collections and zoos now. Dr. Bern Bechtel explained that the term leucism better described her anomaly than 'albino'.

It did have a trace of blood coming from its mouth, which I later attributed to minor injuries from its striking the metal tools used to guide it into a toolbox when they caught it on the road. I proceeded to give the three men a short herp 'show', feeding rodents to several rat snakes and pythons, answering questions, etc. All the time, I’m wondering what to offer them for their find. Would $20 be enough??? Maybe I could offer $50 (and borrow it from my parents if they accepted). Suppose they got interested in keeping snakes after seeing my collection and decided to keep it themselves??? It was hard to concentrate on the tour because I was so anxious about hopefully acquiring the animal.

As I was putting away the last snake and closing its cage, I turned to see the three men heading out my driveway for their car. My eyes immediately went to the aquarium, which, thankfully, still retained the white rattler. Climbing into the car seats, one of the men hollered “We’ve gotta be getting home now - good luck with it!”, and then they just drove away.

They left it to me as a gift ! Cool ! All those educational lectures paid off !

First I had my parents’ ‘No Venomous Reptiles’ rule to contend with. That crumbled quickly because they could instantly appreciate the little gem’s rarity. Besides, I already had a 'pet' Gila monster in my room, and had captured and temporarily held numerous other venomous local snakes. I set 'Al' (the 'albino' – that was my best guess as to its colorless condition at the time) up in a 12-inch (30.5 cm) square aquarium with a bedding of cedar shavings. Nowadays, the thought of those cedar chips gives me chills due to the toxic effect they have on herps, but I had no idea at the time when Mom suggested them "to absorb any odors" the cage might harbor in my bedroom.

I tried a pinkie mouse as the first meal. The little d'back totally ignored it. It ignored a pinkie rat too. Then a fuzzy mouse. It showed no interest in any of them, and I was baffled. It refused those morsels for over a month, and I was worried. Maybe that original mouth injury when it was captured was worse than I thought, and the snake was incapable of eating properly.

Yeah, I know what any seasoned herpers must be thinking about now – that I was clueless! Hey, that was a quarter century ago ; I had to learn all that 'common knowledge' somewhere!

Then my old friend and herp wheeler-dealer Sheffield Edwards visited me, saw Al, tried to trade me out of her (like any older, wiser dealer would have), and finally concluded I wouldn’t swap it for anything. He at least told me to get it off the cedar bedding, and offer a live adult mouse after leaving the snake alone for at least three days to acclimate in its new pine needles and sand substrate. Boy was that great early husbandry advice that no one else had been able to provide up until then! It may have very well saved the snake's life.

When I dropped it in a few days later, that larger mouse didn’t even hit the bottom of the cage before Al struck it. That first meal (in captivity) left a moderate bulge, but was digested completely within two or three days. Feeding was regular from then on, progressing to rats and eventually small rabbits, as is normal for adult eastern diamondbacks in the wild.

My friend Ed Leach of Gainesville, Florida was the first to show me how to probe snakes to determine sex back in the late 1970s. He concluded that Al was in fact an Alice ; his novel sexing technique turned out to be quite accurate. She slowly grew to five feet (1.52 meters) in length, partly through the excellent care given to her by my good friends Greg & Diana Longhurst of Loxahatchee, Florida while they babysat her from early 1977 to late 1978. During that time, I traveled the U.S. with my future wife Kathy and our mobile educational herp exhibit, the Living Jungle, and hadn't wanted to risk bumping the snake all over the country in it. During those wanderings, I met hundreds of private and zoo herpers. Having pictures of Snowflake (her new, intentionally more memorable publicity name) helped start many conversations with them.

We publicly displayed Snowflake in a tiny reptile exhibit ('Creature Feature') during the summer of 1979 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for the first time. She was spectacularly popular with visitors, some of whom were religious leaders from the Smoky Mountains region. Several of them inquired about borrowing her for their special sermons where local timber rattlers and copperheads were the usual participants. We politely declined.

We settled near LaBelle, Florida in late 1979 and set her up in a new large cage. The enclosure was five-foot (1.5 m) long and had a hardware cloth wall section positioned against an outside window through which she could bask in unfiltered sunlight. I had learned from attending numerous herp conferences that explored the newly emerging art of herpetoculture that such natural stimulation might prompt herps to breed. I brought in many normally pigmented males to be her prospective mates, introducing them at various times of the year. Three different males actually bred with her; two matings were in the fall, and one in the spring. Each time, it was a longer event than I expected, one of them lasting about 20 hours. None resulted in her becoming gravid. I never determined for sure if she was sterile along with possessing the obvious pigmentation defect.

We finally lost hope of ever successfully reproducing more leucistic diamondbacks from Snowflake after nearly ten years of efforts. We also needed to raise a large sum of money to start a business project, so we chose to sell her to Tom Crutchfield (Herpetofauna Inc., Ft. Myers, Florida) in 1985. She thrived at Tom’s breeding facility for another 1½ years before succumbing to some unknown malady.

Not only was raising an eastern diamondback rattlesnake for a decade an educational and rewarding experience, it also helped open many herpetological doors as a conversation piece at zoos, conferences, etc. A pure white rattlesnake was quite a novelty to virtually everyone in the herp world back then. To this day, she remains the single most exciting animal I’ve ever owned.

- Bill Love

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