Rattlers Vent Their Venom : The vipers bite 200 people a year. That total would be higher if not for the snake’s own reluctance to strike.

Under doctor’s orders to rest, Jenny Teichert, eight months pregnant, was lying on the living room couch on a recent afternoon when her daughter ambled toward her with something in her hand.

Teichert thought 20-month-old Ann had picked up a string of lint or some clothing that had fallen from the laundry basket.

But as Ann came closer, Teichert realized that the toddler was holding a snake.

As she scooped up the child, the reptile was sent flying across the suburban living room, set amid the ever-expanding housing tracts of the Santa Clarita Valley. Pinpricks of a snake bite bloodied the girl’s left thumb.

When the mother saw the blood, she rushed screaming out of the house with her crying daughter to seek help next door.

By the time rescuers arrived to whisk away the child in a helicopter bound south for Los Angeles, a deputy sheriff had captured the snake. It was a baby rattler, about 10 inches long.

“I never dreamed a snake would crawl into our house,” Jenny Teichert said a week after the incident.

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From the edges of the suburbs to woodland pockets of the city, from the desert to mountains, valleys and seashore, from Thousand Oaks to Diamond Bar to Anaheim to the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Griffith Park, rattlesnakes abound.

The state’s only venomous snake, the rattler bites about 200 humans in Southern California each year and accounts for about two-thirds of the state’s total annual snake bites. Given the snake’s abundance in proximity to Southern California’s 15-million-plus people, rattlesnake experts say it is surprising that the bites aren’t more numerous and encounters more problematic.

“With the expansion of Los Angeles, we are literally building on the home of these animals. We don’t know really how rattlesnakes are being affected,” says UCLA rattlesnake expert Stephen Secor.

It is the rattler’s own reluctance to strike, rather than any human deference to the snake, that results in so few incidents. Once winter rains arrive and temperatures regularly average below the 70s, rattlers begin their brief hibernation.

Until then, they are out and about--from as early as February until as late as November.

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In some cases, snakebite is an occupational hazard.

On Sept. 20, Los Angeles County firefighter Randy Sparks responded to an emergency call about a snake in a Malibu Hills house.

When he entered the bedroom, he saw three pillows on the floor but no snake. He heard no rattling.

“I flipped up the first pillow. And by then he was already latched onto my finger,” says 37-year-old Sparks, who for 15 years has gone on countless such missions and had never been bitten.

But this time, a baby rattler’s spiky little fangs were so fine they pierced the thick gloves Sparks wore. “It was like a little shot,” he says of the Southern Pacific rattler, a subspecies of the Western rattler.

“In two minutes it hit me. I had a flushy feeling. I started vomiting. Then I was starving for air,” says Sparks, stopping to replicate his wheezing gasps.

With his arm swelling to nearly twice its normal size, he was flown by helicopter to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where the staff was amazed to see him pull out a rattlesnake skin wallet.

He remembers little else of the next two days. After five days, he was released.

Symbolic of the new start after he took six weeks to recover, he got a new wallet. It’s made of leather.

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For the most part, snakebites can be avoided, says Dr. Willis E. Wingert, a County-USC Medical Center physician who is one of a dozen medical researchers in the nation specializing in rattlesnakes.

He cites the weirdest case in his experience: A Texas road construction worker who got drunk and tried to kiss his snake. The snake bit him on the tongue, and the man’s tongue became so swollen that a tracheotomy was necessary.

The story, Wingert says, is an extreme example, yet it embodies the genesis of many a bite: lack of respect for the rattler.

“Eight-five percent of all bites are on the hand or arm. That should tell you something about who gets bit,” Wingert says. Another 10% occur on the foot or lower leg.

His experience shows that the vast majority of people bitten are males between the ages of 17 and 27. His favorite statistic is this: One in five bite victims has a tattoo. This group, he says, is made up of macho risk-takers. And, he says, in one out of every three cases the victim is drunk.

However, about 40% of bites are accidental, he says. For example, a hiker might step on a rattler that was dozing and didn’t rattle before striking. And there are the toddlers and children who are naive about the dangers of rattlers.

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The medical helicopter flew 20-month-old Ann Teichert and the snake to Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles, where hospital staffers, after determining that the snake was a rattler, killed it.

The toddler was given five vials of venom-fighting serum. Four hours later, she was transferred to nearby Kaiser Permanente Medical Center and given five more vials. She was placed in intensive care. She breathed rapidly and her skin showed the effects of venom-destroyed tissue.

“She got the full load of this snake’s venom,” said pediatric physician Patricia Clarke, who treated her, explaining that baby rattlers--unlike adults--often unleash all their venom in one bite because they haven’t learned how to bite efficiently.

After two days in the hospital, Ann returned home. Her baby-pink thumb was beginning to blacken where the tissue was dying. If the healing process goes well, there will be little, if any, lasting damage.

“I’m just glad I didn’t get bitten,” said Jenny Teichert, whose baby is due this month.

Teichert, 29, a dental hygienist, and her husband, Karl, 30, an electrical engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, moved to the Santa Clarita Valley three years ago from Santa Monica.

Teichert said she was unaware that they lived in prime rattlesnake country. The Angeles National Forest is just beyond the tawny hills and empty lots that encircle their cul-de-sac.

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For the county animal control officials who often are summoned to neighborhoods like the Teicherts’, rattlesnake calls are routine. For example, the Castaic office covering the Santa Clarita Valley sometimes gets a dozen rattlesnake calls a week. And the standard procedure generally is to kill the snake if it is found at someone’s residence.

Glen Owens, who lives in the San Gabriel Valley, takes a different approach.

“Too many people kill rattlesnakes and don’t need to. The chances of getting bit are remote. I’ve probably come across a couple of hundred in my life,” says 52-year-old Owens, head of Big Santa Anita Historical Society, which promotes the virtues of the San Gabriel Mountains. “You just have to know they are out there and have your wits about you.”

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Development in Arizona threatens to eliminate three types of rattlers there, and the red diamond rattlesnake is losing its habitat in coastal San Diego County. But for most of Southern California, the six major species not only survive, they thrive. (Because they are not an endangered species, rattlesnake numbers are unknown. But one female can bear seven to 12 babies in midsummer after spring mating.)

Glenn Stewart, a Cal Poly Pomona zoologist, says: “In the case of the Southern Pacific (the main rattler in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties), it has still got a lot of habitat left.”

Rattlesnakes, he says, serve an important place in the animal world and human one, explaining that, at the least, rattlers keep the rodent populations of Southern California in check.

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Eight days after Ann Teichert left the hospital, her parents took her back to Kaiser in a panic.

Late in the evening on Oct. 22, with her heart beating rapidly and hives all over, she vomited. By the time she arrived at the hospital, her heartbeat was close to 200 per minute. Her joints ached. Most important, doctors discovered she had fluid in her lungs that was causing respiratory difficulty.

Like many victims who receive rattlesnake serum derived from horses, she was having an adverse reaction that was quite serious.

But after two days of treatment, she returned home, fortunate that she didn’t need amputation or plastic surgery, as some victims do.

Within a week, “she was just fine,” says Clarke.

Shortly after Ann returned, Jenny Teichert walked to her driveway and discovered another snake.

Terrified, she ran inside to call the exterminator. Later, in the grass, he found a nonpoisonous gopher snake.

Still, Teichert says, she’s ready to move.

Rattler Tales

Last year a sheriff’s deputy in Duarte spotted a homeless man carrying a rattlesnake in a plastic bag. The man said he found the snake in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and was making it his guard snake. Animal control officials were summoned and killed the snake with a shovel.

* Woodland Hills residents complained in the summer of 1985 that rattlers were coming into their San Fernando Valley community from wealthy neighbor Hidden Hills. Miffed by the charge that her city’s snakes were at fault, the Hidden Hills city clerk said: “What makes them think these are Hidden Hills rattlesnakes? Were they wearing gold chains or something?”

* After returning from a trip to the Angeles National Forest, two men discovered that they had a 4 1/2-foot rattler under the car seat. Animal control officers in Downey, using a common strategy, sprayed a fire extinguisher into the car and forced out the snake. A police sergeant shot and killed it. Then, according to an account in The Times in 1978, he cooked it and served it buffet-style to colleagues.

* A San Diego County man in 1986 put a rattler in a box--with its rattle purposely cut off--and left it in his mother’s driveway. He was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.

* In 1978, a Pacific Palisades attorney was bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake after reaching into his mailbox. The founder of the controversial drug rehabilitation group Synanon and two associates eventually entered no contest pleas to charges of conspiracy to kill the lawyer.

* Five years ago, a Riverside man committed suicide with rattlesnakes. According to authorities, the man, a collector of rattlers, suffered a heart attack after allowing his snakes to bite him. At the hospital, he also had an allergic reaction to the serum. He had been bitten several times in previous years and, as can happen, developed an extreme sensitivity to the medication and died.

Snake Facts

* The most potent of the area’s six species of rattlers is the Mojave Green--considered among the world’s most poisonous--partly because of its neurotoxic venom. (The sidewinder is the least poisonous). The Western rattler attacks the blood, causing it not to coagulate and causing the capillaries to swell. “(Venom) hits about every organ but the brain,” says Dr. Willis E. Wingert of County-USC Medical Center.

* The rattlesnake is the region’s most commonly encountered snake, more than the king snake (one of the rattler’s chief enemies) or the gopher snake--both nonpoisonous.

* When rattlers are reported in neighborhoods in large numbers, the word is that they are looking for water. That’s a myth. They’re not big drinkers; they’re looking for rats and mice to eat.

* If you live in a snake-prone area, exterminators suggest installing molding on door bottoms (particularly on garage doors) and mesh wire to seal off other potential entrances.

* At the Valley View Elementary School in Duarte, where it is routine to find snakes on the grounds (a student was bitten in 1984), the school rings a special bell to indicate a sighting. Students assemble on the playground until the snake is found. “If we don’t know what it is, we destroy it,” says principal Janet Trostle. In most cases, the snake is a rattler.

* Death by snakebite is rare for humans, if proper treatment is administered. (Experts advise against treating a bite yourself, especially by sucking out the venom. If you are in a remote area, they recommend use of a splint to immobilize the affected area, but not a tourniquet. Remain calm and seek help immediately.)

* Rattlesnake serum was developed in 1935. “How many medicines do you know of that were developed in 1935 that are very good and in use today?” asks Wingert. “It is not very potent. You have to use lots of it. It has side effects. But it works.” A team of international researchers is updating the serum to lessen the adverse side effects.