Residents Recoil as Snakes Arrive

Plenty of dogs would be content to bark and growl at a 3-foot-long Southern Pacific rattlesnake.

Indy, a year-old German short-haired pointer, decided his day trip to Lake Casitas two weeks ago wouldn’t be complete without taking the snake on.

The snake is now dead. And Indy--$730 worth of antivenin and vet visits later--is just fine.

“It was like watching ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom’ right in front of my eyes,” said Indy’s owner, Terry Austin, a resource forester at Los Padres National Forest. “He wouldn’t stop until he killed it, and it was a pretty big snake.”

With spring’s early warm weather and temperatures climbing across Ventura County, authorities say snakes have been slithering out earlier than usual.

To the horror of many homeowners from Ojai to suburban Oak Park, snakes--both venomous rattlers and their nonpoisonous brethren--have been slipping into backyards, garages and woodpiles in large numbers.

“In the last few years, because of all the rainfall and the hot weather . . . they’ve been coming out a lot earlier,” said engineer Richard Sauer at Ventura County Fire Station No. 36 in Oak Park.

Anyone at Station 36 should know.

Firefighters there answered 75 calls about snakes slipping into all the wrong places last year, more than any other county firehouse. Three-quarters of the time, the snake turned out to be a rattler.

The station’s first catch this year was a foot-long baby rattler March 12, just in time to jangle nerves at Oak Park’s town hall meeting that night, where the snake was proudly displayed in a glass jar.

Since then, Station 36 firefighters have caught 10 snakes in the Oak Park and Bell Canyon areas.

“It seems like it was every shift this week,” said Capt. Brian Dilley.

Southern Pacific rattlesnakes, the only venomous snake indigenous to Ventura County and one of the most nonaggressive venomous snakes in the country, make their homes in the tall bushes along hillsides, canyons and barrancas. The snakes eat rodents and are most active in the morning and evening. The coldblooded creatures spend much of their day basking in the sun or lurking beneath shady bushes and rocks, all part of a continuing quest to regulate body temperature.

Despite the early snake reports, county animal regulation officer Patrick Musone doesn’t believe there are any more snakes than usual. Humans just keep invading their turf, he said.

“We’re seeing more because people are forever building in these areas,” said Musone, who has been giving seminars on rattlesnakes to schoolchildren and adult groups for 13 years. “Every time you have construction, you’re kind of forcing them into the foreground.”

Yes, it is tempting to kill rattlesnakes. And many people do.

But experts say rattlesnakes play an important role in the county’s environment, feasting on the rodents that burrow into hillsides and other areas and cause erosion problems.

“Basically, they’re highly beneficial, but you wouldn’t want them around the house,” said Pete Triem, of Ventura, who catches and relocates rattlesnakes for the 2-year-old nonprofit Wildlife Care of Ventura County.

Across the nation, there are about 7,000 venomous snakebites each year, Musone said. Of those bitten, about 12 die.

“More people are killed by bee stings,” he said.

Most of the snakes Triem catches with his 30-inch-long “snake tongs” are in the Ojai Valley. He takes the critters to remote locations and releases them.

Firefighters often take a different approach with rattlesnakes, for whom death comes quickly. The snake is first speared with a long, three-pronged fork, then decapitated with a shovel.

“Some people are a little surprised when we do it, but we don’t mess around with rattlesnakes,” said Station 36’s Dilley.

Firefighters at the Oak Park station say the department has no safe means to transport poisonous snakes and that Oak Park is too far removed from the county animal control office in Camarillo.

Meanwhile, county fire administrators say there have been no reports of snakebites in the county so far this year, save for a number of dogs.

“It’s not all that bad,” said 1994 rattlesnake-bite victim Tom Stone of Moorpark. “I don’t recommend it as a standard practice, but if you do get bit, and you remain calm, for the most part it’s not going to change your life that drastically.”

Stone, who spent a week in the hospital, never saw the rattlesnake that bit him when he was on the hillside behind his home near Ransom Road. The snake left inch-wide fang marks on his hand after Stone reached down to pull some weeds.

“I don’t weed up on the hill anymore,” he quipped. “I weed-whack.”