ANAHEIM HILLS – It’s 88 degrees and not yet noon. A warm wind licks Walnut Canyon Reservoir and tumbles up the Santa Ana foothills, along Hidden Canyon Road to where snake wrangler Jason Magee is digging trenches and telling stories.
Rattlesnake stories.
Two weeks ago, he says, a nearly 4-foot Southern Pacific rattlesnake “with an attitude” buzzed him from under a doggie feeder in a Ladera Ranch backyard.
Magee scooped up the buzzing snake with a 3-foot-long set of tongs and dropped it in a bucket.
“I don’t know if I’d call it being nervous, but nerves and adrenaline kick in that make you more alert,” he says. “You definitely know you’re holding something that’s deadly.”
While most Southern Californians run away from rattlesnakes, Magee spends his summers chasing them. And this summer, he’s chased more than ever.
“This has been my busiest year by far,” says Magee, who owns OC Snake Removal and who has removed more than 1,000 rattlesnakes from yards in the past eight years.
Essentially, rattlesnake bitings are down this year, but rattlesnake sightings are up.
“They definitely come out when it’s hotter,” Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Steve Concialdi said. “They’re looking for water.”
They’re also looking for rodents which, as the drought lingers, move closer to homes with sprinklers. The result is more snakes in more yards.
That keeps Magee hopping.
Last week he snake-proofed a Tustin yard after three rattlesnakes turned up next door.
He inspected a Brea yard where a rattlesnake buzzed a man who was moving his trash cans.
He caught a 3-foot rattler one night in the hedges of an Orange home.
Now he’s installing rattlesnake fencing – galvanized steel mesh that extends 1 foot into the ground and 3 feet above it – for an Anaheim Hills woman whose dog died from a rattlesnake bite.
“They’re definitely on the crawl,” Magee says, of Orange County’s three rattlesnake varieties – Southern Pacific, red diamond and southwestern speckled, which can grow to more than 4 feet.
He walks the perimeter of the fence, occasionally poking a yardstick into shrubs and bushes, then stops and looks out past the reservoir to another foothill where last month a rattlesnake slid into Sara Kim’s home and coiled under her bathroom sink.
It was waiting, it turned out, for Kim.
SNAKE WRANGLER
In the springtime, rattlesnakes like to sit out in the sun to warm up. In summer’s high heat, they prefer shade, corners, crevices and cooler temperatures.
That’s likely why one sneaked into Kim’s house last month – to cool off. And why one hid behind Tom Li’s trash cans in Brea last week. When Li moved the first two trash cans, he heard something but didn’t think much of it.
“I didn’t make that connection,” he says.
Then he tugged at the third can.
“It was intense,” Li says. “There was a rattlesnake right behind it.”
That one got away but a few weeks earlier, snake wrangler Magee caught a pair of 3-foot rattlers cooling off near a Coto de Caza water sprinkler.
A homeowner was carrying in groceries one night and thought the bag hit a sprinkler head. He returned with a flashlight. Its beam illuminated two 3-foot rattlesnakes coiled one on top of the other – right outside his front door.
Magee doesn’t kill the rattlesnakes he catches. By state regulation, he releases them within several miles of where he catches them. And always away from other homes.
He carries no anti-venom in his truck, and he’s never been bit.
He keeps his eyes on the ground; never sets his cowboy-booted foot where he can’t see; and he always uses snake tongs to catch rattlers.
“Safety is my most important thing,” he says. “My dad taught me that at a young age.”
Growing up in Dana Point, Magee began catching rattlesnakes with his dad at age 5. He began removing them for neighbors at age 8.
In college, he did some snake removal for extra cash. Word spread. Soon police departments, fire departments, wildlife societies and animal control began referring calls to him.
“People call me the snake man, the snake guy, the snake whisperer, but mainly the snake wrangler,” he says. “That’s kinda got a cool ring to it.”
Statewide, rattlesnake bites are down this year. The California Poison Control Center reports 131 cases of rattlesnake bites through August – down from 220 cases through August of last year. Countywide, the fire authority reports no 911 calls for rattlesnake bites this year, though the agency doesn’t cover the entire county and not everyone who gets bitten calls 911. But OC Animal Care still gets five to 10 calls a day about rattlesnake sightings.
That included one in August about a snake inside someone’s home.
LOST GARDEN
South Colin Court in Anaheim Hills tallies six houses and three rattlesnake bites in recent memory.
Sara Kim is the latest victim.
On Aug. 18, a rattlesnake coiled under the lip of her bathroom sink. When she entered, the snake dropped to the floor and bit her foot.
Doctors gave her anti-venom but she could barely walk for a month.
“Last weekend, she could walk again,” says her husband, William Kim. “But not too much.”
A week before the attack, a rattlesnake bit a neighbor’s beagle that was nosing around the bushes on its nightly walk. The family took the dog to the veterinarian for anti-venom shots and it survived.
Then there’s the case of Kim’s other neighbor who was tending her beloved garden of lettuce, cucumbers and fresh peppers seven years ago.
As the woman reached to pick a head of red lettuce, a baby rattlesnake, coiled inside, bit two fingers on her right hand.
Her husband, Peter Joo, and daughter Melody immediately drove her to the emergency room.
“By the time we got there she was unable to walk.” Melody Joo says. “And she wasn’t really talking.”
Doctors injected rattlesnake anti-venom and kept the woman in intensive care for five days.
Rattlesnake bites cause intense pain, swelling and tissue damage, which can at times require amputation and, rarely, death.
Despite what you see in movies and on TV, you should never ice a rattlesnake bite nor use a tourniquet, according to Justin Lewis, managing director of the California Poison Control System in Sacramento. Both cause the venom to pool, leading to more tissue damage and possible amputation.
“Doing anything other than getting to the hospital as fast as you can is a bad idea,” Lewis says.
Today Melody Joo’s mother is fine. But her backyard oasis is not.
“My mom was a big gardener, but she doesn’t like to go back there anymore,” Joo says. “It’s completely barren. Everything is dead. Now we have an excuse: ‘It’s the drought.’ But it’s looked like that for seven years – because of the snake.”
CALL OF THE WILD
Willow the Australian shepherd kept barking her head off.
“I called her but she wouldn’t come, so I panicked,” says graphic artist Heather Ohlig of Laguna Hills, who raced into her backyard last week to find her shepherd nose to nose with a rattlesnake – a big one.
The snake was more than 3 feet long. And the distance between the two animals was 2 feet.
“Adrenaline was pumping through me,” Ohlig says. “I guess my mama bear instincts took over.”
She reached in, grabbed Willow by the collar and pulled her away.
Magee later captured the snake.
On average, Orange County hospitals treat 21 patients each year bitten by venomous snakes and lizards, according to the Office of State Health Planning & Development. (The office has no figures available for this year.)
Rattlesnake bites can be fatal, generally killing one or two Americans each year. The last fatal rattlesnake bite in California occurred in 2010.
If you see a rattlesnake, remain calm and step away, Magee says.
If you get bitten, call 911 or get to a hospital immediately – as tissue death can occur quickly.
As the California drought continues, you can expect to see more rattlesnakes around homes, particularly those close to vegetation.
“The lack of water moves their food sources around and brings them closer to water,” Magee says, “and people.”
Contact the writer: tberg@ocregister.com
