A Sensitive Sssssssoul : Compassion: If it slithers, slinks, hisses or crawls, it has a place in Pat Dahl’s heart. And often her home.

Each January, Pat Dahl makes the same New Year’s resolution: to stop bringing home spiders and slithery snakes.

But she can’t help herself.

The 44-year-old Poway woman has a compulsive love for the call of the wild--resulting in scores of fidgety animal house guests that hang from doorknobs, skitter under couches and creep across bedroom carpets in the dark of night.

Her often-rattled husband has opened his sock drawer to come face to face with an equally startled king snake. And the couple’s two teen-age daughters have found live lizards and scorpions in the refrigerator, frozen snakes in the freezer.

But Dahl only flashes a sweet, knowing smile when she thinks of the llama that ran through her living room and the crocodile and alligator crawling in the back yard. She feels as natural with wildlife as with anything that walks on two legs.

Because Pat Dahl understands animals, knows their habits and foibles. The self-taught naturalist and animal handler frequently takes in abandoned exotic pets until homes can be found for them. And, during the past decade, she has run her own outreach program, putting once-untouchable creatures into the hands and hearts of adults and children alike.

With an old Chevrolet Suburban truck loaded with cages, pelts and pamphlets, the former beauty queen and model has conducted show-and-tell animal sessions inside local prisons, juvenile halls, hospitals and classrooms, as well as for utility crews and garden clubs.

Often lecturing free of charge, she has spoken about the beauty, grace and environmental value of all wild things, from wolves to alligators to honey bees. But her special love is the scaly, fork-tongued and creepy varieties that most people fear and loathe.

Dahl’s passion for poisonous predators--particularly spiders and snakes--has won her a tongue-in-cheek reputation as San Diego zoo ambassador Joan Embry’s darker sister, a down-to-earth resource on misunderstood creatures.

The Snake Lady, they call her. Lizard Lips. Spider Woman.

During numerous demonstrations, she has been bitten scores of times by nervous animals--yet her message remains simple: People don’t have to kill things they don’t understand.

“These are creatures who don’t have voices to speak,” Dahl says. “They can’t save their own lives by standing up and explaining to a startled homeowner with a hammer in his hand why it is they do things, why they hiss, slither and growl. That’s what I do. I speak for them.”

Dahl is a former Miss California contestant and successful model who once made her living posing with creatures both dead and alive. But the petite blonde says she long ago rejected such exploitation of animals--and of herself.

Orphaned at birth and raised by sharecropper families in and around Florida’s Everglades and Okefenokee Swamp, the Kentucky native spent her early years as a curious, barefoot child who developed an attraction to the most dangerous but, in her eyes, exquisite and misjudged creatures.

For her, the crocodile’s croak, the howl of a wolf or the jangle of a rattlesnake’s beady tail were instruments in the dissonant music of the wild.

Years later, Dahl studied biology in college and started her own architectural landscaping business, where she mastered the peculiarities of the varied Southern California wildlife.

She came to know snakes as armless, voiceless, legless loners who bite only as a last defense. The haunting splendor of spiders’ multi-eyed gaze, she says, makes them truly something to behold.

“When I look at spiders, the first thing I see is the beauty of the eyes and face and the wondrous texture of their red-tinted fur,” she said. “Likewise, when you hold a snake up into the sun, you can see their scales glitter with the colors of the rainbow.”

Modern culture, she finds, has lost its appreciation for that wild beauty.

“But I haven’t,” Dahl said. “I’m really still that swamp child who wanted to touch and understand everything nature had to offer.”

Although Dahl admits to some insecurity over her lack of the advanced degrees held by some wildlife scientists, her audiences say there is no substitute for her passion.

“If Mother Nature came to the planet in human form, she would be Pat Dahl,” said Barbara Moran, a filmmaker who has worked with Dahl on a children’s video on lizards and other reptiles.

“She’s beautiful. She’s complicated. She’s funny. And she has the ability to change people’s lives and attitudes about nature, to make them look at things in a way they have never done before.”

But, like her animals, Dahl is often misunderstood.

“People get caught up in her label as the Snake Lady or that she’s such a pretty woman, a cute kook,” Moran said. “But that can’t discount what she has achieved: bringing animals to people.”

Over the years, Dahl has done question-and-answer sessions on radio and television and has written a wildlife column for a Rancho Bernardo newspaper.

Mostly, though, the message of Dahl’s work with wild animals has gotten around by word of mouth--neighbor to neighbor, across back-yard fences and telephone lines.

She is frequently called by skittish residents--often in the middle of the night--to remove a snake from the back-yard grass, pluck a stuck possum from a chimney or shoo a skunk from a schoolhouse.

Once, a local department store asked her to remove several bats that were pestering customers and dropping guano all over the fur coat displays.

Dahl relishes any spur-of-the-moment educational encounter, whether it calls for spunk or sensitivity.

During one lecture on poisonous creatures, she snatched the attention of a group of snickering utility workers by kicking over a plastic trash can full of angry rattlesnakes.

Another time, a stranger called late one night, begging her to capture a dangerous-looking snake in his home.

Dahl arrived to find a harmless grass snake and a paraplegic with a childhood phobia about reptiles. She stayed several hours with the man, talking about snakes until he finally let her rub its scales against his face.

“He fell in love with something that was once his greatest fear,” she said. “He later bought a baby boa constrictor as a pet. And he still calls me to talk about snakes.”

Dahl has accompanied government wildlife officials on nighttime desert jaunts in search of poachers, helping agents identify animals, and has sadly watched the local snake population dwindle as a result of poachers’ greed.

Around Poway, Dahl serves in what she finds her most disturbing community role: helping animal control workers and local police humanely kill the dying coyote, possum or skunk struck down along a local road or highway.

The solution--often snapping the animal’s neck to stop its suffering--nearly always shakes her own spirit.

She recalled the coyote who had been struck near a school bus stop.

“Killing an animal like that is such a difficult thing,” she said. “You take the head in your hands while those beautiful yellow eyes, those golden orbs, are looking right up at you.

“But you know the animal is terrified, and that it is suffering. And so you turn your head, because you can’t bear to look, and you quickly snap its neck. It’s the saddest thing I’ll ever have to do.”

Dahl has also taught law enforcement officers how to use their service revolvers to quickly kill downed roadside animals who cannot be salvaged.

“She’s good,” said San Diego Sheriff’s Sgt. David Corn. “She has shown us a number of different animals with the advice that, if you have to kill it quickly, here’s where to do it--X marks the spot.”

But Dahl would rather focus her efforts to ensure that wildlife has a place to run free.

Not far from her Poway home, she recently fought for the creation of the Blue Sky Ecological Reserve, a 400-acre virgin stretch of woods and scrubland that some wanted to bulldoze into a housing development.

Her enthusiasm made a fan of Poway Mayor Jan Goldsmith.

“Pat Dahl is simply an extraordinary person,” he said. “I really don’t think that reserve would be there today without her. She opened my eyes to the whole environment that was out there that I really didn’t understand--the animals, waterfalls and trees--so we would fight to preserve it. And we did.”

And, when Dahl’s animal roadshow was sidetracked earlier this year with the theft of her trusty animal transport truck, she took her message indoors.

Recently, Dahl began working at the Museum of Natural History in Balboa Park, through which she has continued to offer educational lectures on manatees, bears and, of course, snakes and spiders.

Most of her time, however, is spent in the museum’s animal species lending library, a converted basement classroom known as the Dead Zoo, where she supervises the loaning of the pelts and stuffed and mounted creature specimens to teachers and youth leaders.

Dahl jokingly refers to the dead specimens as her pets, regluing lost eyeballs and fixing limbs yanked out of sockets by children.

On several weekday afternoons, fur flies as teachers vie for the best specimens, peppering Dahl with questions about everything from rare snakes to common birds.

“The unique thing isn’t that Pat knows so much, but that she’s so willing to share her expertise,” said Dana Osterlund, a local Cub Scout leader who regularly uses the lending library.

“She’s not at all boastful, so you’re not afraid to ask dumb questions. As much as the animals, she keeps me coming back.”

The carcasses Dahl collects come from the oddest places--from the boy who found a scorpion in his shoe during a trip to the desert to the badger and sea turtle found in the refrigerator of a local Vietnamese restaurant.

Still, a shortage of animal specimens has forced Dahl to continue a grisly suburban regimen: the early-morning hunt for fresh animal road kills.

Rising before dawn, she scours back roads such as Del Dios Highway, so renowned for its carcasses that Dahl calls it the Devil’s Road.

As morning commuters whiz past, she searches for that newly killed possum, snake, fox or skunk that can be gutted, skinned and transformed into a classroom conversation piece.

One Easter Sunday, driving home from Bible study class with her two daughters, she spotted a dead skunk on the opposite side of busy Pomerado Road.

Dahl swerved the truck around and, still wearing her Easter dress and new shoes, she used her bare hands to scoop the half-flattened animal into a wicker basket.

Three days later, she skinned the skunk at her husband’s workbench.

“The garage stank for quite a while,” she recalled. “I tried everything to get the smell out. But my husband understood.”

Marriage for 25 years to a wildlife naturalist has sprung more than a few surprises on Chuck Dahl, a financial executive.

Once, a bread truck delivered a full-grown llama that his wife had neglected to mention she had adopted. Chuck Dahl has come home to stuffed coyotes in the dining room and a 3-foot-long live crocodile in the terraced back yard.

Come animal exercise hour, the couple’s spacious home in an otherwise nondescript suburban tract has been the scene of skulking skunks, iguanas, raccoons, foxes and caiman--animals in search of a home or in the final healing stages before being released.

“The neighbors think we’re a bit strange,” Chuck Dahl acknowledged. “I just try to separate myself from a lot of what Pat does.”

His worst encounter came the night he ventured to the bathroom and accidentally located a missing snake.

“When I went to reach for the doorknob, I had my hand instead on a scaly boa constrictor. I’m not big on snakes. But it’s Pat’s philosophy that animals should be allowed to roam free and not be held artificially as pets. And so they roam sometimes.”

Too freely, some people might complain.

Like the sister-in-law who, after arriving unannounced, opened the shower to find Julius Squeezer, the boa constrictor, taking a bath.

“She was pretty upset,” Pat Dahl recalled. “But I didn’t know she was coming. She should have called.”

And 14-year-old daughter Chari talks of the time a live scorpion skittered past her hand while she was watching television.

“When my sister and I were little, we had tarantulas crawl up the handlebars of our bikes,” she said. “Even today, snakes will get out of their boxes. One still hasn’t been found.”

Although Dahl has permits for many of the endangered species she keeps, such as desert tortoises and birds of prey, she has not always escaped fire from either neighbors or city officials.

She received a letter from the city of Poway animal compliance office after nervous neighbors complained about the alligator she kept in her back yard--a creature named Gatorface who later died and is buried there.

City officials also contacted Dahl after receiving reports of a woman walking with a llama in the area. And they came calling the time she was seen running local streets, exercising a mountain lion on a leash.

But, for the most part, she says, both neighbors and city officials have become resigned to letting Pat Dahl do her thing.

Not long ago, however, Dahl’s family put its collective foot down on the creatures she keeps in the refrigerator.

“Pat kept anything in there, the carcasses of old iguanas, pythons and boas, as well as live things she was planning to bring to one of her lectures, and the worms used to feed them.” Chuck Dahl said.

“Sometimes, you couldn’t get to the food, the thing was so full. You’d open the freezer door and a frozen rattlesnake would roll out onto the kitchen floor. The only way we got it cleaned out was when the refrigerator broke down and the things began to thaw.”

When it comes to things that slither and slide, Dahl just cannot say no.

She once slept for several nights with a 7-foot Burmese python that had been repeatedly burned with cigarettes by its former owner, using her own body warmth to relieve the snake’s state of shock.

And then there was Iggy, the terminally ill iguana, for whom Dahl recently conducted a bedside vigil.

“I know it sounds corny,” said friend Barbara Moran. “But here was this ugly little creature who had been through so many lectures with Pat. She felt she owed something to that animal.

“So she sat in a chair, wrapped it in a blanket and rocked with it, so it didn’t have to die alone.”

Like her snakes, folks say, Pat Dahl will always be a bit of a loner.

“But she’s got tons of friends,” Moran said. “They’ve got fur and they’ve got scales. They’re 22 feet long. And that’s the way Pat likes it.”