Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 1:19 PM | Comments (1)

I’ve always been a nature buff.

As a child, I would go along with my brothers searching through the fields and creeks near my Canton Township home, looking for snakes, frogs, turtles or salamanders.

Sometimes we’d keep the critters we caught in the field, which is now a strip mall on the corner of Ford and Lilley roads, until we got bored with them and let them go or they escaped on their own.

Even so, I was unprepared for the sight at the Wayne Animal Shelter on Friday. The phrase: 64 poisonous snakes doesn’t do adequate justice to actually seeing 64 poisonous snakes up close and personal, the only thing between you and them a plastic container or a wire mesh screen—which the expert on site cheerfully informed us they could bite through if they wanted to.

It was a little bit creepy.

Granted, they weren’t all large snakes. Most were small to average size, some quite pretty. But when Bob Ashley started to move them around, their rattles made a buzz so loud I didn’t really care how big they were.

And there were a few that made my mouth go dry and my collar seem tight. A large but thankfully lethargic diamondback rattler probably measured more than four feet long. There were quite a few that looked threatening enough, coiled back to spring, their tails vibrating too fast to see.

And then there was the cobra.

“It’s supposed to be devenomed, but I try not to take any chances,” Ashley said.

He brushed a hook against the sack the snake was in and it jerked and hissed louder than any cat I’ve angered through my years of good-natured teasing. I thought my camera had malfunctioned, because I was suddenly further away. I had only involuntarily jumped back about two feet.

“We almost needed a mop there,” I said to Ofc. Terry Webb, who was photographing each snake.

“Almost mess up your knickers?” He asked. I nodded with a gulp. Venom or no, that thing was fast and its mouth looked large enough to swallow my fist. At least. My heart didn’t slow down even after they applied a few extra strips of duct tape to keep the aquarium lid in place.

Ashley identified each snake and handled the containers with a casual air of long experience.

“In all my years of doing this, I’ve never been bitten,” said Ashley, who is researching a book on rattlesnakes. “There’s no reason to get bitten.”

Well, there’s no reason to keep 60 rattlers, three copperheads and a cobra in one’s home, either, I wanted to point out, but didn’t. I inched away, took a few more photos, and left.

“Drive careful,” I told Ashley as he loaded the reptiles into the back of his SUV. It seemed like he’d be a hard brake away from a whole lotta trouble.

Suddenly, being an animal control officer didn’t sound like as much fun.

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