Project RattleCam's Pennsylvania camera caught newborn timber rattlesnakes on Sept. 8

The dates in the project's account are observation dates, and the Pennsylvania one is precise to the minute: the neonates arrived at 9:09 a.m. EST on Sept. 8 ^[3]. On the California and Colorado feeds, viewers have watched females deliver their pups live ^[7].

End to end, the three first sightings span 40 days: 12 days from California on July 30 to Colorado on Aug. 11, then 28 more to Pennsylvania on Sept. 8 ^[2][1][2]. One observation per site in one year is not a birthing season moving east. The Pennsylvania camera only went live in May ^[1], so the interval mixes when snakes gave birth with when there was a camera to see it.

Iris is the record I would keep. She was first seen as a baby in California in 2021, she is five years old, and she has now given birth to offspring of her own ^[5]. Her age sits in the project's own footage, so this litter is attached to a female of known age ^[3].

More than 60 newborn rattlesnakes have been observed in Colorado ^[4]. The figure counts animals seen on camera, and the release does not say how many gravid females were at the site or over how many hours of watching the 60 accumulated. Without those two numbers the tally cannot become litter size or output per female.

"There are literally a handful of people in the world who have seen rattlesnake pups being born from their mother," said Scott Boback, the Dickinson College biology professor who co-directs the project ^[8] with Cal Poly's Emily Taylor ^[15]. The design argument came from a student. "One of the reasons it was cool is that behavior is a field that can only really be studied through long periods of observation," said Zoe Aksim of Dickinson ^[9].

Anthony DiMeglio, a Cal Poly graduate student, is using the cameras to test whether pups settle next to their own mother or next to any available adult ^[10]. "Cuddling is a common rattlesnake behavior that provides baby snakes protection," he said ^[11]. "Kingsnakes are predators of rattlesnakes, but in general they wouldn't eat an adult because that's too big," DiMeglio said. "Kingsnakes do target babies, though." ^[12]

Earlier work by Taylor and her students on public feeling toward rattlesnakes found that watching mother-pup interactions often moved people from animosity and fear toward respect ^[13]. Rattlesnakes generally strike as a defense and try to avoid people unless threatened ^[14].