It was just another Sunday hike through the Blue Hills for Sarah Kleinman of Dorchester, Mass. when, suddenly, she had a startling encounter. “I took a step and noticed right under me — probably a foot away — was the biggest snake I’d ever seen,” she said.
What the nurse midwife had come across was a venomous, five-foot timber rattlesnake.
Her reaction? What else? She grabbed her phone and started recording!
“My first thought was that it must have escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo,” she said. However, when she shared her footage with Mass Wildlife officials, she learned that timber rattlesnakes are native to all six New England states.
That said, it was still a somewhat rare sighting, because the species is among the most endangered in Massachusetts. After more than a century of population decline, the 7,000-acre Blue Hills Reservation is one of the few areas in the state left where the species has been able to survive.
Want to see one for yourself? The Blue Hills Trailside Museum has two on display – they are being rehabbed after getting injured in the wild.
“A lot of people seem to be really interested in this, actually,” Kleinman said. She has been somewhat stunned by all the attention her sighting has received. “Mostly people were just horrified that I even had this meeting with a snake,” she said. “So I had a lot of validation for the fear I felt in the moment.”
Although a bite from the snake she encountered wouldn’t have been fatal, Kleinman is still happy she didn’t step on it.
Mass Wildlife experts told Kleinman she was among the fortunate few in this region who has ever seen an adult rattlesnake up close. “I didn’t feel very lucky at first,” she said. “But now after a few days have passed — and because it’s such a unique sighting — I can embrace it a little bit more.”
(THUMBNAIL PHOTO: Getty Images)