William H. “Marty” Martin, 80, was killed Aug. 3 after being bitten by a timber rattler on his property in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, according to his wife, Renee Martin. Despite his age, Martin regularly made the arduous trek into the local mountains to document snake populations in remote locations, according to Joe Villari, director of the Bull Run Mountains Preserve in northern Virginia. “He was in his 80s and it was hard to keep up,” said Villari, who would accompany Martin on his bimonthly excursions. Martin was perhaps the nation’s leading expert on timber rattlers — a notoriously hard-to-find species — which he had studied since he was a child, according to John Sealy, a rattlesnake researcher from Stokesdale, North Carolina. “They are extremely secretive animals,” Sealy said. Snake bites are rarely fatal. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that they are responsible for about five deaths a year in the US. Dan Keyler, a professor of toxicology at the University of Minnesota and an expert on snake bites, said a second snake bite can be more deadly than the first for some people. Rattlesnakes in particular can be more dangerous if they grow to a size that allows them to inject more venom, and a person’s age affects their susceptibility, he said. Martin had been bitten before in his career but recovered. Villari said timber rattlers tend to be docile, avoid human contact and often don’t bite even if accidentally stepped on. “They save their venom for their prey,” he said. By postal cables
