By Ronica Stromberg
Dennis Ferraro leads a boot camp with a waitlist to get in.
Now approaching 70 years old, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor teaches what he calls "herpetology boot camp" at the Cedar Point Biological Station in western Nebraska every summer. This year, he taught the four-credit course June 16 to July 5, 2024.
The course caps at 14 students, and the lucky undergraduates who get in spend 8 to 10 hours a day, six days a week, for three weeks learning about and catching snakes, frogs, turtles, lizards and salamanders. They microchip the amphibians, turtles and reptiles and track how the animals use the environment and fare in it.
Ferraro may catch and microchip rattlesnakes, but these undergraduates will not. Only graduate students in Ferraro’s one-credit "Safe Handling of Venomous Reptiles" class are certified to work with rattlesnakes.
In "Field Herpetology," the official name of Ferraro’s boot camp class, the herpetologist and conservation biologist teaches the proper techniques and tools to use to work with wild amphibians, turtles and reptiles.
Students learn to catch snakes without grabbing them by the neck or the tail. Snakes can get hurt when grabbed by the tail, and like most animals, they don’t take kindly to being grabbed by the neck.
Instead of the neck grab, Ferraro teaches students to slip both hands under the body of the snake and support it.
"Cuddle its body, and then the snake is fine with it, and no one gets bit, but as soon as you touch them near their neck, they're going to turn and bite you," he said.
See more images and read the rest of the story about Dennis at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1171