“I was walking out to my van, with my dogs, who all saw the snake or smelled the snake before I saw it,” says Willie Cooper, describing a recent reptile close encounter he had on his Sonoma Mountain ranch in the Diamond A area.
The uninvited visitor was a Pacific Western rattlesnake.
“There it was, just coiled up in the shade of the van,” says Cooper, a private chef. “So I got a rake, and I, you know, ‘dispatched it,’ pretty quickly. Then I took a picture and posted it on Twitter.”
Cooper admits to having killed “a fair number” of rattlesnakes in the 12 years he’s lived on that property. He believes that the number of snakes he’s been seeing and hearing about in the Valley are heavier this year than in the recent past. That said, snakes appearing on his own property, he says, are fewer this year than in the past, but that’s because he’s taken measures to dissuade them from visiting.
“I have three cats, and they do a very good job of mitigating the rodent population around my place,” he says. “So snakes have less motivation to drop in for a visit.
Cooper says his neighbor isn’t so lucky.
“She has all these rock walls, and rodents – but no cats – and she’s been seeing a lot of snakes this year. I keep telling her to just go out and get a cat.”
Local snake experts say it’s hard to determine whether there are actually more snakes than usual this year – or if they are simply a bit more active than in the past.
“We haven’t had one call this year,” says Officer Dave Huber, of the Sonoma Police Department. “We don’t generally have a lot of contact with people who’ve run into rattlesnakes,” he adds. “The spring of last year, we found a small rattlesnake near the Field of Dreams. The last time before that was about four years ago, when I removed a rattlesnake from a backyard.”
Huber points out that a lack of rattlesnake calls to the police department doesn’t mean there have been no sightings of the fanged, percussively inclined creatures within the Valley. Just that they’ve gone largely unreported.
While reports in the Valley are few, according to the California Poison Control Center, there are an average of more than 800 rattlesnake bites per year, statewide, between the months of April and October. At least one or two of those, per year, results in death.
“This year, rattlesnake calls are definitely up a bit,” says Al Wolf, of Sonoma County Reptile Rescue, a nonprofit focused on safely capturing and releasing reptiles that have somehow shimmied or slithered into places where they are not wanted. The past few summers, he says, snake numbers have been down, likely due to the drought. That’s suddenly changing.
“Rattlesnakes tend to estivate when there’s a drought,” Wolf says, referring to the state of dormancy reptiles undertake during particularly dry periods. “But this year there was enough water, so were seeing more snakes out. They breed in April. They spread out, and they have live babies. So, we’re going to start seeing more of them now.”
Generally, it’s dogs and small children who are most at risk.
“Dogs or kids hear the rattle, they get curious, and they get bit,” Wolf says. “Dogs tend to get bit in the face. That’s always a bad place to get bit. You usually don’t know it happened until later, when your dog’s face is all swollen.”
That said, Wolf suggests that, based on calls he’s gotten, dog bites appear to be down a bit this year.
“The year before last, I heard of about 40 dogs that were bitten by rattlesnakes,” he says. “Some of them died, but most survived. This year, I’ve only heard of about 15 bites, and no deaths that I know of. It’s possible there are some I haven’t been told about.”
As unsettling as a snake encounter can be, Wolf says people should avoid becoming overly frightened by snakes, focusing instead on how to behave should an encounter occur.
“Don’t panic, don’t scream, don’t run,” he says. “Just slowly move away. Rattlesnakes aren’t really all that lethal. They don’t want to bite you any more than you want to be bit.”
Should the unlikely occur, and you are bitten, the same advice applies. Stay calm.
“You’re not going to die,” he says. “Just go to the hospital. Don’t race to the hospital like a bat out of hell, or you’ll cause an accident and then you really could die. Just call ahead to the hospital, and they’ll be ready to help you. We know how to treat snakebites now. As a human, everything’s in your favor. We have not had one death in Sonoma County in at least 15 years.”
Above all, Wolf says, never kiss a rattlesnake on the mouth.
He’s not joking.
“There was a guy who was out with some friends,” Wolf recalls. “He was drinking and clowning around, and he encountered a rattlesnake. He decided to show off, and he grabbed it, and started kissing it. It bit him, of course, but he didn’t know how bad he’d been poisoned, because he was already pretty drunk, and he couldn’t tell the difference.” By the time the would-be rattlesnake make-out-master realized he was in trouble, it was too late.
“Oh yeah, he died,” says Wolf. “The point is, being drunk and being poisoned by a snake feel kind of the same. Being drunk is being poisoned, technically. I’ve been bitten 13 times. I know what I’m talking about. Your lips go numb. You lose coordination. It really is a little like being drunk, at first. Then you start swelling up. So, you know, it might seem obvious, but never, never kiss a snake – especially when you’ve been drinking.”
Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com.
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