Residents Rattled : Warmer Weather Means an Early Snake Season

An uninvited guest slipped into the living room of William and Jan Brankin’s Simi Valley home the other day: a baby Southern Pacific rattlesnake.

“At first my husband thought the dog had pooped on the carpet, because that’s what it looked like, all curled up,” Jan Brankin said. “He was about to kick the dog when he realized it was a snake--a rattlesnake at that.”

Such encounters are occurring across Ventura County and Southern California this spring as warmer temperatures draw snakes into the back yards--and sometimes the homes--of people living near the deserts and foothills of Southern California.

Between April and October, depending on the weather, animal control officers and firefighters respond to thousands of snake sightings.

“The first rush of snakes are starting to show up,” said Bruce Richards of the Los Angeles County animal regulation office in Agoura Hills, which also handles calls from Thousand Oaks.

“We tell people to expect it because it’s going to happen,” he said. “It may be only one rattlesnake, but that may be the one that gets you.”

Jan Brankin, the mother of a 3-year-old boy and baby-sitter to two other toddlers, said the children had played in the back yard most of the afternoon before the reptile wound its way into the living room.

“It’s a little worrying, especially with small children around,” said Brankin, who is eight months pregnant.

“But we’re encroaching on his land as much as he’s encroaching on ours,” she said. “Just a few years ago, this whole area was barren. We’ll be keeping a closer eye on the yard from now on, though.”

Using thick leather riding gloves, William Brankin herded the snake into a sealed bucket until he and his wife relocated the wayward serpent to the hills above their Wood Ranch subdivision. Officials say the better course would have been to call in an expert.

Already this season--the breeding period for rattlesnakes--Richards and his colleagues have responded to 11 rattlesnake calls in the hills around Thousand Oaks. They’ve answered another two dozen calls throughout their region, which stretches from Chatsworth to Topanga and west to Thousand Oaks.

Two rattlers were reported Wednesday in a man’s driveway in Topanga.

“He said they looked like they were dancing, but I know what they were doing and it wasn’t dancing,” Richards said.

Ventura County fire crews have answered 21 calls in other parts of the county, and Ventura County animal regulation has investigated at least a dozen more.

“The only reason we have this onslaught so far in Thousand Oaks is because the temperatures have been so summer-like,” Richards said. “That sends a signal to the rattlesnakes to come out from where they hibernate.”

California is home to four general varieties of snakes: rattlers, gopher, garter and king snakes. The non-venomous garter, gopher and king snakes account for most of the 120 species that make up the state’s four general varieties.

Rattlesnakes--representing six different species--are the only venomous snakes in California. The most populous by far is the Southern Pacific rattler, which grows to about 6 feet long.

Hikers in Caspers Park east of San Juan Capistrano already have reported several snake sightings this season.

“People usually see them along the trails, but they avoid them and the snakes slither back into the brush,” park official Gina Drury said. “We’ve had several sightings, but no bites.”

Experts say that animals are more often the victims of snakebites than human beings because they are both curious and ignorant about the reptiles.

Last year, a riding horse died within 30 minutes of being bitten by a rattlesnake at O’Neill Regional Park in Orange County. The woman astride the animal told officials that the snake seemed to attack the horse.

“It was a very aggressive rattlesnake,” park ranger Ron Slimm said at the time.

One emergency-room physician said he hopes this season is nothing like a year ago, when heavy rains increased the rat and mice populations--favorite foods of many snakes--and brought him a host of rattlesnake victims.

“We had a real run last year,” said Philip Macniel, an attending physician at the UC Irvine Medical Center emergency room. “At one point, we had four (bite victims) in the course of three weeks. One of them was particularly ill and had to be put on life-support.”

Snake sightings typically occur in the deserts and foothills--and in the housing developments that have sprung up next to them.

“Most of our calls are in Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Simi Valley,” said Sandi Wells of the Ventura County Fire Department. “They’re hot, dry valleys and we have a fairly large population of people in those areas.”

Wells said just one rattlesnake bite has been reported so far this season: a mountain biker in the Rincon hills north of Ventura who sat in a patch of tall grass.

“The rattlers really seem to be aggressive when they’re disturbed,” Wells said. “People should be careful when they’re hiking and stick to well-used trails.”

Southern Pacific rattlers, however, do not limit themselves to undeveloped open spaces.

Officials at the Burbank Animal Shelter routinely answer snake-sighting calls in the hills above the city. When they do, one officer said, they don’t bother trying to relocate the snake. Instead, they hack it to death with a hoe or shovel.

“We respond immediately to the call, and the snake is dispatched on the spot,” said Senior Animal Control Officer Harold Hagler, who said the season so far has been somewhat slow, with only a handful of reports.

“These mountains have all kinds of hikers,” Hagler said. “You can’t relocate a poisonous reptile to where a citizen could get bit.”

Some Ventura County fire officials feel the same way.

“If it’s determined to be a rattlesnake, we kill it on the spot,” said Capt. Ken Maffei. “We’re not going to jeopardize our people by playing with rattlesnakes.”

Maffei said warm weather has resulted in numerous snake sightings in Ventura County.

“We didn’t have a tremendous amount of rain this year, so we expect to see them coming out of the hills to get water,” said Maffei, who is stationed in Moorpark. “I took one out of a bathtub last year.”

Some people say snakes have gotten a bad rap. Ventura County animal regulation officials have begun an education program designed to teach people that snakes are beneficial.

“Our whole purpose is to keep snakes alive,” said Kathy Jenks, the director of the Ventura County Animal Regulation Department.

“There’s something about snakes that people are afraid of inherently,” she said. “But we’re trying to show people that snakes have a place in Ventura County.”

Patrick Musone, Jenks’ full-time education officer, gives lectures on the benefits of snakes.

“Snakes are killed strictly out of fear and ignorance,” he told a group of youngsters at Peach Hill School in Moorpark recently during one of the scores of snake-awareness programs he conducts each year.

“Their numbers are seriously depleted more and more because we’re building on the hills and the hinterlands,” he said. “But snakes are super beneficial, because rattlesnakes kill gophers and other burrowing rodents.”

There are major, easily discernible differences between venomous and non-venomous snakes, Musone says.

Venomous snakes have triangular heads, thicker bodies, blunt tails, pushed-up noses and Loreal pits--small holes between the nostrils and eyes that are used to smell. Non-venomous snakes have none of those characteristics.

Musone tells children--and anyone else who will listen--that without the serpents, rodent populations would swell to even larger numbers and mudslides would become more frequent because of the holes dug by rats and mice.

“We’re trying to reach the youth now so the future generation will be a little less harsh on animals that are misunderstood,” he said.

Lisa Clark understands just one thing about rattlesnakes: They bite. While hiking in Matilija Canyon near Ojai last summer, she stepped on a slumbering, 6-foot rattler.

“I got very sick from it. I was in the hospital for 10 days,” said Clark, who owns a hair salon in Ojai.

“I’m still not over it completely, not really,” she said. “But as for the physical part of it, it was three months before I got better. They gave me antivenin, but that didn’t work too well.”

On a quiet hilltop above Simi Valley, nearly 24 hours after finding the infant rattler lazing on her living room carpet, Jan Brankin and her husband loosened the lid from their bucket.

They had kept the foot-long snake overnight until William Brankin could decide exactly where to release it.

“It just slithered away in the long grass and went off,” Jan Brankin said. “It was quite relieved to get out after being cooped up so long.”