Yes, he has been bitten. Four times.

But as Michael Shwedick begins his 40th straight school year of mesmerizing Washington area kids with his traveling reptile show, the staggering thing is not his history of venomous snake bites. It’s not the 12,000-plus times he has performed his show, or the nearly 1 million miles he put on one Econoline van. It’s not even the collection of cobras, crocodiles, pythons, pit vipers and snapping turtles that he keeps in an unmarked corner of an anonymous office park near Annapolis.

No, the most amazing thing about Shwedick is the magnificent durability of his obsession. It was at age 12, pretty much at the moment he saw a picture of a researcher handling a cobra in a library book in Oxon Hill in 1966, that he settled on his life plan: Acquire reptiles, care for reptiles and expose kids to the wonders of reptiles. That’s exactly what he’s been doing ever since.

“Thank you so very much for being here; what a wonderful, wonderful pleasure this is for me,” says Shwedick, standing before dozens of restless students from Bethesda’s Pyle Middle School. They grow instantly still at the sound of the hypnotic baritone coming from the little bearded man with a radio mike clipped to his safari shirt. In his pauses, they hear some provocative scratching from the padlocked wooden crates stacked behind him.

It’s his third Reptile World show of the day, but Shwedick’s patter changes little over a day – or a decade (at least one teacher in the audience, Alan Prunier, remembers hearing it when he was a student in Rockville). The spiel is a mix of ecology, myth-busting (water moccasins are not found in this region) and safety tips (most bites occur when someone is trying to catch the snake).

But the lecture is quick; in just a few minutes, Shwedick’s assistant, David Dean, lifts a massive alligator-snapping turtle from his case and the kids shift from entranced to delirious.

“When I started to care for this turtle 40 years ago, I could pick him up in a breakfast spoon,” Shwedick says as Dean strains to hold up an animal that is now the size of an overstuffed ottoman. “Every morning, I’m glad to see him, but he’s not glad to see me. He doesn’t know me. Reptiles don’t have feelings.”

From there, the eyes grow only wider. Next up, the 6-year-old alligator, then the five-foot-long anaconda (who recently swallowed her first pig), followed by an agitated western diamondback rattler. The young crocodile, mouth agape, goes over big. But there is not a whisper as Shwedick brandishes, with bare hands, a loudly hissing and fully fanged Egyptian cobra.

And then, with the help of five teachers, he unrolls all 15 feet and 238 pounds of his grand finale: a prehistorically huge yellow python named Banana Boy’s Brother.

Pandemonium. Shwedick nods with a calm smile as the crowd shrieks and points and gapes.

Finally, everyone lines up to pet the python, Shwedick bends over to hear the questions and Deal loads up the van. They do this 350 times a year.

“Michael is truly one of a kind,” said Betsy Sirk, a NASA program manager who recently ended a 10-year stint of booking arts and science programs for the Cloverly Elementary School PTA in Silver Spring. “He is one of the bright stars out there, year after year. He inspires them. Children look at him and see that he turned his love of reptiles in a lifelong adventure. They get that.”

Back at his holding facility a few days later, Shwedick reflected on the reptile life – his and his animals’. An unwavering passion for the coldblooded and scaly has meant a low-paying routine of constant travel and 16-hour workdays. He answers every letter from every student, which sometimes arrive in batches of 20 or more. He types up every contract on a IBM Selectric, and, most demanding of all, he can never skip a day of caring for more than 200 animals, many of them deadly (there are few petsitters for pit vipers).

“What a great journey it’s been,” he marveled, standing at the unmarked door to his secret bestiary.

Shwedick’s reptile lair, which he does not open to the public, is a warehouse space the size of a one-bedroom apartment a few miles from his house in Crofton. It’s meticulously neat, with steel snake hooks hanging just so and glass-fronted cases lining several walls.

But it’s also decorated like the coolest man cave ever, with fake palms over the crocodile tanks and leopard-skin curtains over the door. Incense mixes with the faint whiff of bananas in the 80-degree air and spa music plays on a stereo. A Jim Morrison poster looms over the tortoise pen. There’s a bottle of tequila on a shelf. He spends hours here, in what he calls “the shop.”

Shwedick readied a tray of chicken legs, dead fish and thawed mice – dinner for his Chinese alligator, which has just been bellowing. “That’s a sound few humans hear outside the Yangtze River basin,” he said.

The place is packed with reptiles, but Shwedick’s little brother, Bruce, a respected crocodile breeder, has taken most of the big ones to his facility in Florida. The brothers, born of a snake-hating mother and an Air Force father, nursed each other’s love for reptiles as biology geeks in Prince George’s County in the 1960s.

They kept crocs in the tub and snakes in the basement, where Shwedick would spend hours pondering reptiles and listening to the Doors. When his sisters and mother balked at the growing collection, a sympathetic biology teacher let Shwedick keep the animals in class, but only if he agreed to write reports and give presentations. In 1970, he did his first talk for money, $15 to show his animals to his brother’s fifth-grade science class. A hobby had launched a career.

A year later, he persuaded his high school to let him graduate early so he could hit the road full time. Skipping social life and eschewing college, he began calling schools out of the phone book. His reputation grew (he once appeared on a Baltimore TV talk show hosted by a young Oprah Winfrey).

As long as he could scrape together money for mice and gasoline, Shwedick was happy. But it was a hard, sometimes-treacherous life. In 1976, a cobra’s bite missed the rat Shwedick was holding with a steel tweezer and got him in the hand. Doctors helicoptered antivenin serum in from the National Zoo. In 1979, it was a copperhead that got him and the drug came from the Baltimore Zoo. There were others: a crocodile crushed his hand on a school stage once; an anaconda nipped him at National Airport.

“When I get bitten by a reptile, it’s because I made a mistake,” he said, defending his critters.

Shwedick married, raised two kids (neither of whom is all that keen on reptiles) and divorced. He lived alone with his reptiles for more than a year, but has since found a new partner. All is right in Reptile World.

“Michael and I are two people who understood at an extremely early age exactly what our passion was,” said his second wife, Lisa Farias Shwedick, a former dancer with the Alvin Ailey company. “That brings us together. I understand what this means to him.”