Relocating the Rattlesnakes

July 17, 2007 — -- Bo Slyapich spends his summer days beating through the brush, looking for trouble in the hills outside Los Angeles…and most days he finds it.

Slyapich is "the rattlesnake wrangler." If you've got a snake, he will come and get it, even if it's hidden from sight.

"Now this is where it gets spooky. We can't see," he said, poking his nose under the barbeque in one backyard.

He put his face down close to the ground, and used a fiber-optic scope to look inside the soda machine by the pool.

"OK, we are good," he said.

Slyapich wears tall snakeproof boots and thick gloves, and he sometimes packs a gun loaded with snake shot, "like a mini shotgun shell."

And this summer, he's busy. Busier than he's ever been.

"I have never seen anything like this," he said. "I have three to four times the calls I had last year to this date. …I'm getting one to three dogs bit a day. I'm getting a call for a human bite every four days. Not good."

'Always Scared'

The heat and drought in Southern California have driven the native rattlesnakes out of the dry hills into the cool green yards of peoples' homes. Sometimes you can hear a sound like a lawn sprinkler…when the sprinklers aren't running.

"I've been catching these things since I was 5," Slyapich said. "I know where they're going before they do. I know their habits. I know everything about these guys."

Despite that knowledge, the rattlesnake wrangler said he's "always scared. I'd be stupid not to be scared."

Part of the problem, Slyapich said, is that the rattlesnakes don't always rattle.

"Through the years the ones that rattle are getting caught and getting killed," he explained. "The ones that are passive don't always rattle. Those are the ones that are living and passing on the passive gene. So we're getting rattlesnakes now that don't rattle."

To Catch a Snake

Slyapich keeps boxes of captured snakes in the back of his truck. And he's always happy to pull one out for a little education about rattlesnakes and snake bites.

"Rattlesnakes are lazy," he said. "They let things come to them. Then they strike and whack at 'em."

In all his years of catching rattlers, Slyapich claims he's never been bitten by one, tapping his head for luck when he says it.

Many of his customers live in expensive hillside homes, built where rattlesnakes live.

One day a couple of road workers caught a big rattlesnake that slithered out of the bush, and they called Slyapich up. The rest is snake wrangler history.

You'd think Slyapich would hate snakes, that he'd be on a campaign to eradicate them. But he doesn't even have a snakeskin belt.

"I relocate 'em in an area where there's no population," he said. "No need to kill 'em, they were here first."