Snake Hunting

“Life is an exciting business.”

Helen Keller

Warning: Don’t read this post if you don’t like snakes. You won’t like them any better after you read it.

Snake hunting is an interesting hobby. As a kid, I used to catch snakes for fun. Usually they were garter, gopher, or king snakes. I caught them with my friends and cousins up at Lake Tahoe or near our home in Tarzana, which was somewhat rural at the time. We kept them a couple of hours or days at most, and then let them go, as none of them would eat in captivity.

Once, my cousin Stephen and I were riding our bikes at his house, and we thought we saw a garden hose moving across the width of the driveway. We realized it was a gopher snake and was at least eight feet long. We raced up and grabbed it with all four hands, but it outsmarted us. The snake wrapped itself up tightly in the very dense bushes next to the driveway and was loudly hissing at us. That scared us, as we kept looking back at its tail to make sure there were no rattles. Gopher snakes and rattlers can look a lot alike. As a matter of fact, sometimes a gopher snake will hit its tail against leaves to imitate the sound of a rattlesnake in hopes of scaring away predators. The hissing worked pretty well on us. Every time we gave an inch, it would get further into the bushes. We realized we would never get it out without hacking up the bushes, so we let him go. That was the longest snake I’ve ever seen outside a zoo.

As a Boy Scout, I was running down a trail in the Angeles Forest and noticed that my next step was going to land on a rattlesnake sunning itself in the middle of the trail. Mid-stride, I kept my front foot stretched out as far as I could, and somehow my momentum flew me over the snake. I just kept running and never looked back.

Over the years, I would see a rattlesnake, sometimes on horseback, and would quickly move away from it. When Liz and I were engaged to be married, we participated in Engaged Encounter through our church at a retreat center way up in the hills of Santa Barbara. On a break, we walked down the long and remote driveway. On the way back up, Liz was a few steps in front of me. I suddenly yelled, “Stop, back up!” Thankfully, she did, and the five-foot-long rattlesnake directly in her path and just the color of asphalt made the rest of his way across the road.

When we moved to our last home twenty years ago, our relationship with snakes changed quite a lot. Our property backed up to what is known around here as the Ahmanson Ranch, fifteen thousand acres of open space, which is now a state park.

We got lots of unusual visitors: raccoons, skunks, possums, deer, and even a mountain lion, though that was long ago. Once, our son was up early and saw six coyotes standing together on the hillside behind our house. He hopped the fence, and they dispersed. But not so with rattlesnakes; they tended to work their way into our yard and hide under piles of rocks in the bushes, because there are lots of little critters that get their attention.

Our gardener Jared once came in and said he’d caught a pretty big rattlesnake. We have a snake grabber that we bought online for just such a purpose. You might think we just kill the rattlesnakes, but I don’t want to do that.

Jared had already put him into the large trashcan. Jared used the snake grabber to lift him up so we could take a good look at him and determine if he was the same one we caught two weeks before. After close examination, we decided he wasn’t, as the pattern and the rattles were slightly different.

My assistants Eileen and Caleb came out to have a closer look, and I snapped the photo. I’d like to say that Eileen was standing as close as it looks; she’s really about three or four feet back from the snake. Eileen is quite an adventurer herself, having just come back from vacation in the Dominican Republic when this picture was taken, the day after the hurricane came by.

So, what did we do with all these snakes? If you figure three a year, and it was more than that, we caught over sixty rattlesnakes over the twenty years we lived there.

We would put them in a small metal trashcan with a tight lid. That can be a bit tricky, as sometimes they don’t want to stay in. But once we got the lid on, they quieted down. I then seatbelted the trashcan into the backseat of my SUV. Safety first!

We relocated them to what we call Rattlesnake Alley, which is really one of several open spaces miles away. Once there, I tipped the can on its side and kicked off the lid, and away they go. I’m pretty sure the snakes liked that, and so did we. They couldn’t get back to our house, and they were free to live out their lives doing whatever snakes do, somewhere else.

So, just another day in our backyard.

-Hank