San Francisco: Al Wolf is used to clean one or two snakes from under the house but recently called by a woman who said he had seen a slender rattlesnake under the northern California house and was surprised to find more than 90 snake snakes preparing for hibernating.
Wolf, director of Sonoma County Reptile Rescue, said he crawled under the mountain slopes in Santa Rosa and found a venomous snake immediately, then the other.
He came out from under the house, grabbed two buckets, wearing a long and safe glove, and back in.
He crawled in his hand, knees, and stomach, flipping more than 200 small stones.
“I continued to find a snake for almost four hours the next,” Wolf said on Friday.
“I think oh, good, it’s a valuable call ‘but I’m happy to be able to come out because it’s not good, you run to spider webs and dirt and the smell is ugly and your mess and you are in your stomach dirty.
I mean it’s successful.” But the work paid off.
He used a snake pole 24-cm (60 cm) to remove 22 adult play snakes and 59 babies when he first visited the house in the Mayacamas mountains in October 2.
He returned twice since and collected 11 snakes again.
He also found dead cats and dead possums.
All snakes are the North Pacific Snake, the only poisonous snake found in North California, he said.
Wolves, who have saved snakes for 32 years and have been bitten 13 times, said he responded to calls about snakes under the house in 17 districts and had seen their dozens in one place in the wild but never under the house.
He said he took a row in the wild of people and sometimes on private land when farmers asked them to control pests.
Wolf said there was a plan to return home again before the end of the month to see if there was a snake again.
“We know it’s a den because of a baby site, and the number of females that I found,” he said.
Rattlesnake usually hibernates from October to April and looks for rocks to hide below and a warm place and will return to the same place year after year.
The homeowner did not erase any stone when they built a house, making it an interesting place for reptiles, Wolf said.
“The snake found a house to be the right place for them because the stones gave them protection but home too, gave them protection from wet during the winter so, it was a double isolation for them,” he said.