Profile: Moses Michelsohn

Like a superhero; he carries the daily weight of two identities. By day, Moses Michelsohn is the mild mannered education intern at Archbold Biological Station who patiently introduces school children to the natural wonders of the florida scrub. But, as the buses drive off, he trades his professional polo for yet another faded tie-dyed tee and wanders off into the night, snake-hunting. Armed with a hooked stick, a headlamp, and several large ziplock bags, he catches snakes for his own curiosity, adding to his amazing mental library of herp facts, myths, and adventures.

Herps, in case you’re not yet hip to the lingo, is the way herpetologists refer to their study species- snakes, lizards, and amphibians, collectively. They are a quirky bunch, herpetologists, combining a nerdy passion for scientific discovery with a thrill-seekers addiction to catching the uncatchable: the slimy, poisonous, and dangerous creatures most of us try to avoid.
Herpetologists tell much better stories than birders or plant ecologists, possibly because they’ve flirted with fangs, not just feathers and flowers. Moses, true to his academic peers, is quite the story teller. While his real love is frogs, he has found more adventure in catching snakes. In his few months at Archbold, he has reported Eastern Diamondback, Cottonmouth, and Pygmy Rattler sightings, and brought back plenty of pretty but safer specimens. Curious after seeing his captures on many previous nights, I got myself invited on a trip out to snake road-cruise.

Road-cruising? According to Moses, and obviously the herpetology lore that inspired him, one of the best ways to find snakes is to drive up a small country road at dusk and just after, catching the herps when the are visible and vulnerable- the open border crossing. Moses’s snake road is a rough dirt road between ranchland, located in the middle of nowhere south central florida. Any road might do, but what makes this road special is the frequent wetland ditches on either side, prime herp habitat, that motivates their border crossing.

“Here’s the thing,” he started explaining, as we arrived on the infamous snake road, “It’s not all Animal Planet- everywhere we go we can’t just catch a rare snake like Jeff Corwin does on TV.” Instead, it’s about patience, practice, and a willingness to put up with terrible pop radio, the only accessible signal in the vicinity of the middle of nowhere, Florida. In fact, snake-hunting is incredibly lazy work.

He explains the search image, what to train your eyes to watch for, and I begin scanning the rough dirt road for dark, slender, tubular shapes. We brake several times for suspicious sticks, shadows, and once, very excited, for suggestively coiled bungee cord. In between false alarms, we saw a small wild hog, several birds, and a disputable bobcat (He was there, I saw him, Moses was too focused on the road to see the glowing eyes, I stand my ground). To pass the time as we cruised at 4 mph, he told me how he got hooked on herps, when a biology lab put him waist deep in a swamp, trying to catch the frogs who were calling from every direction, surrounding him, hiding and taunting. We talked about graduate schools, invasive frogs, and the Hannah Montana phenomena on the radio. Before we knew it, we were back to the highway.

“Are you going to write about how I couldn’t get it up?” he asked me as we returned to the research station, snakeless. Moses claims to have only returned without snake sightings or captures twice, and both of those times he was traveling with company. So perhaps it’s my fault, not his, I broke the magic. The mythical snake road might just be a plain old dirt road after all. But I’m not sure I’m ready to give up the dream just yet.

He’s left Archbold now, gone to an actually research job, chasing answers to questions of evolution and speciation in the form of small amphibians across the pacific northwest. But his legacy lives on- I even caught my first wild snake- a docile green vine snake, but still- inspired by his example. In his honor, we’re planning our own adventure out to snake-road this week; headlamps, a field guide, and, obviously, Moses on speed-dial.