The Rattlers Next Door

Story by  Cameron Walker

It’s deep spring at Chimineas Ranch, a former cattle operation just outside central California’s Carrizo Plain National Monument. Oak trees, scrub, and clusters of lichen-spattered rocks decorate golden, rolling hills. Fat ground squirrels dart through dry grasses, and the sun blazes hot even though it’s only 9 a.m. Conditions are ideal for meeting a rattlesnake.

That might not sound like a good thing, but it’s exactly what snake biologist Emily Taylor has in mind. On this April day, she’s brought a dozen students from her undergraduate herpetology class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, about 60 miles to the west, to observe rattlesnakes in their natural habitat.

Taylor sets out a bin of canvas gaiters for protecting everyone’s legs against an accidental bite. Most run from ankle to knee. I pick a pair that looks like the hip waders used for fly fishing, happy for the extra coverage. They swish awkwardly as we wade through tall grass toward an island of rusting farm equipment full of promising places for snakes to hide. After a few unsettling minutes, someone spots a gopher snake, a nonvenomous species often mistaken for a rattlesnake. The temperature rises; my enormous gaiters begin to feel ridiculous.

At last, one of Taylor’s graduate students finds our quarry under a piece of corrugated metal: a rattlesnake with a diamond-shaped head, which promptly shrinks its body into a coil.

I’ve only ever heard a rattlesnake’s tell-tale sound in movies. Out here, it’s different. Less like the maraca I imagined, and more like the buzz of a cicada. I check my watch: 10:03. Five minutes later, the snake is still rattling, frozen in place. Something in me unwinds a bit, seeing a creature that seems more frightened than I feel.

Caution around rattlesnakes is warranted. California’s Poison Control System receives several hundred rattlesnake-related calls each year, mainly from hospital staff treating someone who’s been bitten. A rattlesnake bite is painful and requires an emergency trip to the hospital, along with expensive doses of antivenin. Sometimes it has long-term physical effects like lingering pain or numbness. Very rarely, it causes death: bites from venomous snakes, including rattlers, kill about five people in the U.S. each year, out of 7,000 to 8,000 reported bites.

In contrast, some 800,000 people seek medical treatment each year for domestic dog bites. Rattlesnakes would much rather slither to safety than bite something they can’t eat, Taylor says. They also play a vital role in their native ecosystems as food for important predators like coyotes and red-tailed hawks, and as consumers, eating rodents that can carry human diseases like hantavirus.

Yet these qualities often get overshadowed by fear. When bite deaths make national headlines, the media tends to sensationalize rattlesnake dangers. News stories call the reptiles “merciless.” Reddit threads debate the best gun for dispatching them. A Colorado community newspaper has outlined how to decapitate one with a shovel. Some states even still allow “roundups,” contests where participants hunt and kill as many rattlesnakes as they can. Combined with habitat loss, these attitudes and practices have harmed many rattlesnake species, including the eastern diamondback (Crotalus adamanteus), which is under consideration for the federal endangered species list, and the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus), which several states list as endangered.

In hopes of saving more rattlesnakes in her home state and elsewhere, Taylor is trying to address their PR problem. In 2019, she founded Central Coast Snake Services to help people in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties remove snakes from their property and learn more about their reptilian cohabitants. People can call the hotline, and Taylor or another qualified person will respond, free of charge, to relocate the snake safely and humanely to more snake-friendly habitat. Along the way, Taylor talks to residents about how to safely interact with rattlesnakes. She provides rattlesnake education and training to everyone from security guards to agricultural workers. She and her colleagues set up remote cameras in rattlesnake dens in California and Colorado, and broadcast the footage. She’s even worked with her honors class at Cal Poly—nicknamed Team Rattlesnake Rebrand—to organize schoolkids to write more than 1,000 letters to try to bring more awareness to what’s billed as the nation’s largest rattlesnake roundup, in Sweetwater, Texas.

Taylor’s work became more urgent once the pandemic started. Trail use exploded, taking some hikers deeper into rattlesnake country. Urbanites spent more time in and even relocated to rural outposts where snakes are more common. More than one-third of rural counties saw an influx of new residents between April 2020 and July 2021, according to one study, with more congregating in places with attractive, accessible wildlands.

The resulting human interactions with rattlesnakes haven’t always been positive. In the summer of 2020, at the Pismo Preserve in San Luis Obispo, for example, a man pulled out a sign that cautioned hikers against disturbing snakes and used its post to stab a rattlesnake in its den. Taylor tried to patch up the animal, which was pregnant with 12 snakelets, but neither mother nor babies survived.

Changing peoples’ relationships with rattlesnakes may be even more important in the future, Taylor says. Right here at Chimineas Ranch, she and her graduate students conducted research that suggests rattlesnakes could thrive as global temperatures warm, which could mean humans and snakes crossing paths even more frequently. “It’s going to sound like a hippie thing,” Taylor says. “But I really see every single rattlesnake’s life being saved as a win.”

If anyone can convince people to admire rattlesnakes, it’s Taylor. I’d always pictured snake lovers as goth-like and reclusive, but Taylor is pure sunshine. She gushes over her bright-blue Subaru and sings along when ’90s band Bell Biv DeVoe comes on the stereo. On her Twitter feed, she gives snakes charming nicknames like “spicy noodles.” She once commissioned an artist to create a Bambi-style illustration of a big-eyed mama rattlesnake and her snakelets to help other people see the appeal. On her back, Taylor has a tattoo of a woman with hair made of snakes—a North American Medusa, each lock a different species of rattlesnake that Taylor has studied. The species at Chimineas is among the curls: a western rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus), found from Baja California to British Columbia.

Taylor’s snake fixation began in college, when she did undergraduate research on the Baja California rattlesnake (Crotalus enyo) with University of California, Berkeley herpetologist Harry Greene. An English major, she was also fascinated by humans’ often tense relationship with snakes and wrote her senior thesis on serpents in the Bible. There, references going back as far as 3,000 years toggle between the snake as a symbol of evil, as in the Garden of Eden, and also a representation of rebirth, wisdom, and even healing.

People’s complex relationships with snakes may go back even further. One study suggests that primates’ perception of snakes has been evolving for some 80 million years, and was heavily influenced by the lethal risks species like giant pythons and boa constrictors posed. People and non-human primates generally have high visual awareness of snakes. In one study, undergraduates in Japan recognized snakes camouflaged in a landscape faster than they could pick out other creatures hidden in similar ways. In another, seven- to 10-month-old babies looking at photos of snakes, caterpillars and frogs, had a spike of electrical activity in their brains each time they saw the snakes.

Whether from a hard-wired response or the snake stories I’ve heard my whole life, I feel cautious as I pick my way through the farm equipment. But the snakes that appear continue to surprise me. The second rattler we find seems less unnerved by our presence and flicks his tongue at us without a rattle. “Hello, sir,” Taylor says, as she uses a pair of 36-inch-long metal snake tongs—her preferred tool for safely working with rattlesnakes—to grasp the middle of the snake’s body. She slides a clear plastic tube over his head so she can examine him safely. Then, she beckons the class forward to stroke the snake’s keeled scales: smooth in one direction, rough in the other. She shows off the rattle, which can vibrate faster than a hummingbird’s wing and is made from keratin, the same stuff that’s in human fingernails. A baby snake starts with a single rattle called a button, and grows a new segment each time it sheds its skin.

Rattles can break off, so the length of a snake’s rattle doesn’t necessarily indicate its age. But like tree rings, each segment can provide clues to previous environmental conditions. Taylor points out a series of three rattles. The snake likely grew the first during a superbloom year when the ranch was flush with water and ground squirrels. This one looks like the juiciest kernel on a corn cob. The next two rattles are scrawny in comparison: “We can see the impact of the drought,” Taylor says.

We abandon the junk pile and drive to a hillside with a promising rocky outcrop. It, too, is full of snakes. A male and female rattler entwine inside a crevice, and others hide beneath a nearby rock and some brush. When they realize they’ve been discovered, they slither deeper into hiding; none attempt to strike. By the end of the day, we’ve seen 10, the last one tucked inside a burrow. When Taylor tubes the final snake, everyone peers at the rattle. Like before, the segment that corresponds to the wettest year is more substantial than the others. “It’s like magic,” Taylor says fondly.

Snakes are sensitive to environmental changes beyond moisture. Air temperature is also a key factor, since snakes rely on their surroundings to manage their body’s heat. That’s what led Taylor and Hayley Crowell, Taylor’s former graduate student, to start looking at how climate change might impact rattlesnakes in San Luis Obispo County. “Working on reptiles and any ectothermic animal that depends on its environment to regulate its metabolism, it’s always in the background of your mind,” says Crowell, now a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. “If things change, it’s going to mean something for these animals.”

To find out exactly what, the research team fitted 85 rattlesnakes with radio transmitters and devices that log hourly temperatures at four sites in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, including here at Chimineas, where summer heat can soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Every year from 2010 to 2017, they chronicled what temperatures corresponded to the snakes’ most active period. At hotter inland sites, snakes’ body temperature averaged between 73.4 and 75.2 degrees, while snakes in milder coastal areas tended to run slightly cooler. The researchers also brought a group of snakes to the lab to test how they react to temperature shifts in real time, using a sandy arena with an artificial temperature gradient. Those rattlesnakes sought out the hotter spots, bringing their body temperatures, on average, to between about 86 and 89 degrees. While the controlled space of the laboratory can’t exactly replicate the rattlesnakes’ natural environment, the difference in body temperature suggests that these rattlesnakes might prefer warmer body temperatures than what they currently experience in the wild.

Typically, rattlesnakes retreat to dens in rocky crevices or other animals’ burrows—or sometimes, cozy garages and crawl spaces—to weather the cooler fall and winter months in a low-energy state called brumation. When it warms again, they emerge to seek out food and mates, and eventually to give birth and care for their young. Crowell cautions that in nature, unlike in the lab, rising temperatures would likely have a range of ripple effects for rattlesnakes and the complex ecosystems they live in. But in theory, she says, a warmer future might mean that rattlesnakes “could be active more often, which means more opportunity to find food, which means more opportunity to find mates, which means the breeding season is longer” In other words, it’s possible these rattlesnakes could be climate “winners” that succeed while other species wilt.

Increased activity could also mean more encounters with humans, which worries Taylor and others like her. In northern California’s Placer County, Tyler Young’s company Placer Snake Removal has been relocating snakes for 12 years. Young says calls have increased as more people relocate from the Bay Area to spots like Folsom Lake, Butte County, and Oroville, “all places that you might bump into a snake.” He finds snakes by air conditioner condensation drip lines, where they gather to get water. He finds them under dog houses and in garages and, in cooler months, by warm dryer exhaust vents. He’s topped out at 200 removals a year: “A single person can only catch so many snakes,” he says.

In San Luis Obispo, Taylor and her snake removal services team—primarily graduate students and others she’s trained to safely handle snakes—start getting a rush of calls in spring, when snakes emerge from their winter hibernacula. Callers have found rattlesnakes inside of tool sheds and beneath decks and outside the Cal Poly dorms. Taylor has seen rattlesnakes curled around the bottoms of planter pots and inside bird baths, searching for water. Like Young, a lot of Taylor’s work also involves talking with homeowners and property managers, pointing out potential spots snakes might like and suggesting ways to make their property less attractive to reptilian visitors. Ultimately, she says, it’s safer for both people and snakes to move them rather than try to kill them, which understandably leads to more aggressive defensive behavior.

While the people who call Taylor’s hotline might have snakes’ best interests in mind, she’s not sure everyone does. “On a large scale, I think there’s way more rattlesnakes getting killed than relocated,” she says. Still, the fact that anyone calls gives her hope. And the calls are on the rise: In 2022, her team of seven rescued around 50 snakes in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara; in 2023, they rescued more than 100, an increase that Taylor attributes to a growing awareness of her team’s snake relocation services.

With Taylor’s help, some communities have shifted their relationship with their rattlesnake neighbors. In the Coachella Valley town of Indian Wells, for example, a private gated community called The Reserve prides itself on its natural setting. Nestled against the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center, a 6,122-acre UC Riverside field site, The Reserve has luxury homes, a 21-hole golf course, and hiking trails, as well as bighorn sheep, bobcats, and rattlesnakes.

In 2017, when a rattlesnake turned up in a storage closet, The Reserve’s director of security Mitch Spike called local animal control. The person who came removed the snake and promptly chopped its head off. “I was shocked,” Spike says. He started researching other options, and in 2018 ended up convincing The Reserve board to have a rattlesnake expert train the security staff. “I said, ‘we’re going to encounter these things anyway, we might as well do it safely.’”

Now, the entire staff takes a class from Taylor every year or two on rattlesnake natural history; about half also opt to take a certification course to handle and remove rattlesnakes. When residents call about snakes on their property, these staffers are available to catch and release them into better rattlesnake habitat. Over the past two years, Spike says, “I’ve probably done about a dozen of them myself.”

Several months after visiting Chimineas with Taylor’s students, I meet up with her in Bakersfield for one of her snake handling courses. Demand for her services keeps increasing, with 15 snake training courses rounding out her schedule for the year. This one is at the headquarters of McCormick Biological, a consulting firm that focuses on the San Joaquin Valley. Seventeen employees gather in the conference room as Taylor goes over everything from rattlesnake facts (females can store sperm from males inside their reproductive tracts—sometimes for years—which means they can have a clutch of babies with multiple fathers) to what to do if bitten (have a way to contact emergency services from the field, take jewelry off the affected limb, elevate it, get to the hospital right away) and how far to relocate a rattlesnake (a quarter- to a half-mile from where it’s found—far enough to minimize human contact but keep the snake within its home range).

Then, everyone meets 27-year old Buzz, who waits in an orange bucket. “Y’all are going to keep encountering rattlesnakes, probably more and more and more every year,” she tells the group.

Taylor uses her snake tongs to lift Buzz out of his bucket and lowers him onto the concrete floor. She cautions participants to never use their hands when working with a rattlesnake. Both she and Young, in Placer County, have been bitten. Taylor was tubing a rattlesnake as a graduate student; Young saw a rattlesnake escaping into a homeowner’s drywall and reached his hand in to grab it. (“I think that’s the dumbest half-second decision I’ve made in my whole life,” he says. “If I was being tugged out by a 6-foot-size thing with strange legs, I would bite me too.”)

Taylor demonstrates how to use the tongs to gently grasp Buzz around his midsection and return him to the bucket. Then she coaches the trainees through the same steps as they each take a turn with the tongs.

“You’re always 100 percent focused on the snake,” Taylor says. The trainees murmur quietly as they watch the others practice. There’s something about the slow, measured movements that makes each person and the rattlesnake look like they’re in a careful dance. I can feel my body relax, too, falling into rhythm. Buzz doesn’t rattle once.

One of the trainees, Maria Ortega, had never encountered a rattlesnake before starting to work as a biological technician for McCormick. “I’d always had this image in my head that [rattlesnakes] are terrible and they will bite you,” she says. Her work in the field has already helped her grow more comfortable with them, a feeling the training only deepens.

Even for people who never pick up snake tongs, Taylor contends that learning more about rattlesnakes can inspire appreciation for them and the role they play in the world. A citizen science project that she first started near Steamboat Springs, Colorado with Dickinson College herpetologist Scott Boback provides ample evidence. Project RattleCam placed cameras on a butte frequented by prairie rattlers (Crotalus viridis) and set them to take photographs every five minutes. (The effort now has cameras livestreaming prairie rattlesnakes in Colorado and western rattlesnakes in California.)

In 2021, the project managed to attract more than 6,000 volunteers from around the world who studied the snakes remotely. Over eight months, they analyzed more than 60,000 images for rattlesnake presence and behaviors, including “rain harvesting,” where the rattlesnakes coil themselves up, then flatten their bodies into water-collecting disks which they can drink from. The volunteers even spotted baby snakes lapping water from the backs of their mothers.

That’s what Taylor thinks can really soften the relationship between rattlesnakes and people: parenting. If people could see rattlesnake mothers caring for their young, she says, “we could change people’s minds about them.” Mother snakes and caregivers stay close to their young, and in experiments, actively defend young snakes and return to them when separated. “It’s ironic that something as maligned as a rattlesnake is sort of the ultimate mother,” Taylor says.

At the training in Bakersfield, she shows an ultrasound video of a fetal rattlesnake heart, beating inside its mother’s body. Several people in the room sigh. Then there’s the video of a baby snake emerging from its amniotic sac—unlike most reptiles, which lay eggs, rattlesnakes have live births—and taking a first breath. “Adorable,” someone murmurs.

I’m still not sure that’s a word that comes to mind when I think of rattlesnakes. But the following summer, when I come across a patterned snake stretched across a warm patch of trail, I stop and take a breath in, too. I peer into the grass to see if I can spot the rattle, recalling the waterfall feel of a snake’s keeled scales. My heart flickers with something like fear, but also like elation. And I remember that small inhale on the screen, and that also-beating heart.