Musician Marty Kupersmith, 83, got a rattlesnake tattoo to commemorate his bite.
Musician Marty Kupersmith, 83, got a rattlesnake tattoo to commemorate his bite. ( Becca Tucker)

‘The tip of my nose and my lips got numb, and I said ‘Ah, I’ve been envenomated.’

Nearly painless, occasionally fatal: What’s it like to get bitten by a rattler?
06 Oct 2025 | 10:20
Evergreen

Marty Kupersmith, a musician then in his 70s with a lifelong love of reptiles, was relocating a timber rattlesnake that had been in someone’s doorway in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., when he got bitten in 2018.

After responding to a police call for a nuisance rattler, he’d kept this gravid female overnight,...



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