“DANGER, VENOMOUS REPTILES.”
The red and white warning label stuck to the side of a basic blue bucket, the kind you might get from a home-improvement store, wasn’t kidding.
In a faded baseball cap and a casual t-shirt with a wildlife logo, Chris Frauenhofer undid the tightly threaded white lid. The tell-tale sound of a Great Basin rattlesnake made its presence known.
“A lot of people don't get to see these animals this close up …”
Frauenhofer, the wildlife biologist for the Utah Army National Guard at Camp Williams in Bluffdale, used a long-handled metal hook to gently lift the snake out, guiding it head-first into a translucent tube for safe viewing.
Its forked tongue flickers to help interpret the environment. The only thing sticking out of the tube is the rattle, which Frauenhofer stroked.
“They have such a range of colors, you know, they can be really beautiful. Like, some are a caramel brown, others are a bright mustard yellow, and anywhere in between. So just yeah, there's the beauty of the snake.”
The rattle is made of the same stuff as human fingernails. And in this case, it’s even painted green — a mark showing it’s been captured before. Much like pencil lines on the wall of a family home showing a child’s growth, this also shows how much the snake has grown.
“We want to know how big the snake is and things like how much it weighs, he said. “We’ll actually put a little electronic tracker or tag on it, too, much like you’d put in a cat or dog and get some really interesting data.”
Frauenhofer's outdoor lab spans more than 20,000 acres, and his inside lab is housed in one of the many nondescript small buildings dotting the camp’s center. That’s where he brings rattlesnake specimens before releasing them back into the wild.
The military is required to manage natural resources on its land. For Frauenhofer, that means protecting humans from wildlife — and protecting wildlife from humans. But whatever the project or animal, he’s constantly learning new things.
“Some morning I'm waking up and I was like, ‘OK, we've got, you know, rattlesnakes that we're going to track today, and we're going to take some data on them.’ And then the next day might be, well, I'm actually going to wake up a little later and we're going to catch bats, and work doing some conservation work with bats at night. And then the next day, it's like, ‘Oh, well, the monarch butterfly is now listed. So, we got to go do some surveys for them.’”
His fascination with wildlife began in New York state, where he was born into a critter-loving family. His mother taught school biology, and outdoor adventures were part of family life.
“My uncle really liked turtles, and so I'd follow him around on the docks of this vacation place. And he would have this big net, and he'd catch these big snapping turtles.”
He loved reptiles and amphibians the way many kids love dinosaurs.
Frauenhofer didn’t initially plan to become a wildlife biologist. Rather, he was headed for a life of suits, ties and polished shoes. He started out as a business major.
“But once I learned about becoming a wildlife biologist, I realized I didn't have to sit at a desk and that I could take my passion for the outdoors literally outside. You know, I kind of never looked back.”
He worked in the Northeast with turtles, but the move to Utah brought him to the rattlesnake.
“The rattlesnakes are so interesting to me because they do have that cryptic aspect to them, where they're kind of hard to find. I consider them actually kind of lucky, because these snakes, for the most part, are ambush predators. They just sit and they wait for rodents.”
And even though the sound of the rattle can still take Frauenhofer by surprise, he appreciates it as a warning rather than a threat.
“It's just fascinating, their biology and the way the rattles were actually developed to let predators know that they were there to keep things away from them.”
He’s never been bitten and said there’s only been one occasion when he was threatened. It was when he found a mother with six newly born snakes.
“She actually used her tail to push those rattlesnakes back under the rock away from me,” he said. “That snake was doing something to protect its young, which we think of as a mammalian quality, not necessarily something a reptile would do.”
Frauenhofer's work is deeply rooted in conservation and a desire to clear up misconceptions about the often maligned rattlesnake. But he said there is something natural about people’s fear.
“We evolved from primates. We used to sleep in trees, and snakes were one of the few things that were a predator for us, because they could get up into trees. So we all have this maybe innate fear of snakes.”
But it’s also something that we’re taught as children. Where, at first, there might be fascination, he said that adults usually tell kids something like “Oh, don't, don't touch that. That's a snake. It's gross or scary.” But even if they aren’t cuddly, rattlesnakes are protected under Utah law, and Frauenhofer said there’s good reason for that.”
“In reality, snakes actually do a lot of good for people. They control rodent populations, and snakes actually don't pass on diseases to humans.”
And there is the potential for one day using rattlesnake venom for medicinal purposes.
“So basically, I'm just trying to help where I can — to get some other people into maybe doing some research on snakes that would help us to further understand them and conserve them and keep them around for other generations.”
As his workday neared its end, Frauenhofer placed the rattlesnake safely back in the tightly sealed bucket and into a cabinet.
It’s the type of cabinet you’d store files in at an office rather than a venomous rattlesnake.
And that’s not lost on Frauenhofer, who has no regrets about his career choice, though others often find it curious. Like the friend who works in finance, who noted that “you and I do very different things for money,” he said with a laugh.
“There's definitely challenges to this job that are unlike other jobs because of working with stuff like rattlesnakes or birds. But you know, they're not any less rewarding.”
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