Sahuarita couple strikes out into desert for snakes that strike back

Dan Massey bends down and shines a flashlight into the narrow mouth of a rock outcropping, about 100 feet up a hill. It’s a known den for black-tailed rattlesnakes.

One is coiled close to the opening of the shelter.

“Gorgeous,” Dan calls to his wife Melanie. “Absolutely beautiful.”

Gently, he pulls out the snake and they marvel at its yellow-brown coloring, the dark, splotchy markings running over its body as well as the black mask across its eyes.

Dan passes his right prosthetic foot inches from its head. The snake is nonplussed.

“He’s not striking,” Dan explains. “Hasn’t struck once. Very, very docile snake.”

This is a pretty typical Saturday morning for the Masseys.

“There’s never a time we’re not herping,” Melanie says.

“Herping” as in herpetology, as in prowling for snakes. It’s the Sahuarita couple’s passion, one shared with a nationwide audience when the two were featured on the recent Discovery Channel series “Venom Hunters.” The show followed four different teams and while snake-hunting is a moneymaking venture for the others, self-taught naturalists Dan and Melanie don’t get paid. Instead, they do it out of their desire to educate and further animal conservation. These days, their hobby has added importance as medical researchers study snake venom and its potential to fight disease.

Regardless of whether or not the show is picked up for a second season, the Masseys will still head out, usually in the Santa Rita Mountains they consider their backyard, picking their way through cow pies, heavy brush and bullet casings in search of rattlesnakes.

“This is what we love to do,” Melanie says.

It was old-school nature shows like “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” that introduced Dan, 47, and Melanie, 44, to the wonders of wildlife when they were kids. Dan — who says he was exploring the Santa Ritas while still in diapers — grew up catching snakes and lizards alongside his dad and older brother.

Melanie, a former vet tech who works as a software solutions manager, also loves animals but didn’t start bagging rattlesnakes in 600-thread-count pillowcases until after meeting Dan in 1997 at the automotive shop where they both worked.

The pair has raised two daughters, been married for 14 years and together for nearly 20, but they’d been dating only a month when Dan took her out to look for rattlesnakes. They still laugh about that first shared snake encounter.

“She’d run one way, and I’d run toward it,” says Dan, a clinical pharmacist at Banner-University Medical Center.

In no time, though, Melanie was also headed in the same direction after snakes.

“Take me out into all these beautiful landscapes and how they can carve out a life in these harsh environments, it hooked me,” says the self-described tomboy who also appreciates a good manicure.

Their Sahuarita home is full of photos of their desert and non-desert adventures — including time with a beluga whale at SeaWorld — as well as his ’n’ hers TVs and PlayStations. Their girls are grown and gone, but they still have “fur babies” at home, Wally the schnauzer and Onyx the Staffordshire bull terrier.

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Parked out front is their burnt-orange, four-wheel-drive Jeep — black letters spelling out “Rattler” grace the rear passenger side. The cupholders typically cradle Red Bull, Dan and Melanie don’t do coffee, and the Jeep’s stocked with aspirin, tweezers, winches and jacks, all things you need for charging through rough terrain. On those occasions when they’re gone for days, Rattler tugs a pop-up trailer and a generator — to power Melanie’s blow-dryer.

“My wife is fine as hell,” Dan says. “She likes to do her makeup, she likes to do her hair, so we better have a generator. I bought two generators, one as backup.”

The Jeep is also equipped with hand controls since Dan is a double amputee. The full story, Dan says, requires a few hours and a beer. The short version: The former mechanic began experiencing debilitating pain in his feet and eventually was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy. He endured 11 surgeries and eight years in a wheelchair before deciding to amputate both legs just below the knee in 2006.

“It was a gamble, a shot in the dark,” Dan says.

One that paid off. The pain’s gone, and with his prosthetics, he can still hike and capture snakes. He and Melanie have never been bitten, and having prosthetics gives him extra protection in tall grass.

While Dan was recuperating from the amputations and studying to be a pharmacist, he realized just how well herping and his new career meshed. He published a paper on the protein composition of 27 different Mojave rattlesnake venom samples and how they changed geographically across Arizona. Naturally, he and Melanie captured all their subjects. Dan also studied scorpion venom, which required wrangling 120 of them in New Mexico. In the dead of night. In what was originally billed to Melanie as a “vacation.”

“They were on the dinner table for three months,” Melanie says with a laugh. “Our youngest daughter helped collect the venom.”

Dan curates reptiles for the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center and gives “tox talks” to medical residents. If he’s speaking about the venom of a particular rattlesnake, he’ll go out and bag one to show the students. Having someone like Dan around is a huge asset, says Keith Boesen, the poison center’s director.

“What Dan helps us with is a lot of the behavior of the creature itself,” Boesen says. “When you combine the clinical and the biology of the snake itself, it allows us to be a more effective teacher.”

It was Dan’s work with poison control that hooked him and Melanie up with the Discovery Channel show. Their 15-day shoot last summer was full of long hours in 100-plus degree heat. Melanie recalls one day of filming that was so hot and rigorous, she had to cool down in the Jeep, which was also rigged with cameras.

“I’m so hot, and I lift my shirt up and see the GoPro lights blinking,” she laughs. “I said…”

Well, you can imagine what she said.

The Masseys think it would be cool to do TV again. Their dream is to star in “The Dan and Melanie Show,” a throwback to the old nature programs they loved as kids. Cameras would just follow them around as they do what they love. The couple knows that’s a tough sell, though, when reality programs on the air today feature a lot of manufactured drama. These two don’t even fight.

So, they’ll just continue with their private audience-of-two program for as long as they can.

“Hopefully, we have another 20, 30 years,” Melanie says.

As aging makes their hobby more difficult, they’ll do what they’ve always done.

“We work around it,” Dan says. “If I find a snake, I’ll slam on the breaks and I’ll have Mel run out and get it.”