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THE OREGONIAN (Portland, Oregon) 27 August 03 The snakes were found Monday on a hillside near the high school's junior varsity baseball field (Rick Bella)
Lake Oswego: Linner Mishler was quite skeptical when two young men asked to use her cell phone so they could report a couple of rattlesnakes near Lakeridge High School.
But when Mishler followed them to a hillside near the junior varsity baseball field Monday evening, she became a believer.
"At first, I was thinking, 'Yeah, right,' " said Mishler, who was helping to coach her daughter's soccer team. "But then I saw them, big as life."
The unusual discovery -- rattlesnakes are pretty rare in Western Oregon -- triggered a sequence of events that included Mishler holding one snake by the tail. But within minutes, the snakes with potentially fatal bites were killed, and school officials were hustling Tuesday to ensure the safety of the 1,100 students and 100 faculty and staff members returning to classes next week.
"Unfortunately, there could be more snakes for all we know," said Nancy Duin, Lake Oswego School District spokeswoman. "We're going to try to keep people out of the area and keep our eyes open. If we see any snakes, we'll call in pest experts to get rid of them."
School officials cordoned off a 50-by-50-foot area just up the hill from the left-field foul line. On Tuesday, they called in an exterminator to scout the area and research a report of another sighting. But the search for additional snakes proved fruitless.
"If there are any others, they could be long gone by now," said Randy Schilling, operations manager for Eden Advanced Pest Technologies. "They really don't like all the noise and traffic and vibrations here. But we can't say for sure."
Mishler said that after conferring with another passer-by, Jack Bramsman, a retired Lakeridge counselor, she called police on her cell phone and kept an eye on the snakes.
She said one remained coiled, but the other tried to slip down a gopher hole. She said she carefully pulled on its tail until it was about half-way out and continued to back out on its own.
"Then I got back -- in a hurry," Mishler said.
A community-service officer, who usually deals with pesky raccoons and dead squirrels, answered the call. But apparently, there is no city policy regarding snakes.
Just then, a construction worker from the high school, which is undergoing a $26.8 million reconstruction, walked across Overlook Drive to check out the commotion.
"He must have been sent from heaven because he had a shovel with him," Mishler said.
The man dispatched the snake with a couple of sharp chops. Mishler said she killed the other with the shovel.
The construction worker then chopped off the rattles as a trophy and tossed the lifeless carcasses in an area slated to be paved over. On Tuesday, police and school officials retrieved the carcasses for study.
Don Vandebergh, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, said some subspecies of Western rattlesnakes live west of the Cascades but aren't commonly found in populated areas. He said the snakes could have traveled piggy-back on a load of construction materials hauled from Eastern Oregon, or they could have been illegal pets that someone dumped. He said Oregon law prohibits keeping rattlesnakes as pets.
"Luckily, most Western rattlers are pretty docile and don't get aggressive unless they're provoked," Vandebergh said. "In any case, it's a good idea to keep your distance if you come upon one."
Lt. Terry Timeus, Lake Oswego police spokesman, said the rattlesnakes were the first he has encountered in 17 years on the force. He said police would work to develop a policy regarding rattlesnakes encountered in the future.
The snakes were found Monday ...

LAKE OSWEGO REVIEW (Oregon) 28 August 03 Snake Oswego? Two rattlesnakes are killed at Lakeridge High School, some suspect more snakes in area (Scott Hammers)
It was around 7:30 p.m. Monday evening when Linner Mishler began losing patience with the Lake Oswego Police Department.
The self-proclaimed soccer mom was standing on the junior varsity baseball field at Lakeridge High School with one hand curled around her cell phone, and the other grappling with a writhing and decidedly unhappy three-foot rattlesnake. Twenty feet away, a second snake was headed west along the hill. Anxious for help to arrive, Linner dialed the police for the second time in 15 minutes.
“I’m sitting here holding this snake’s tail, waiting for the police to show up, so I finally called them again and said, ‘Are you COMING? I’m holding a SNAKE!”
Help was on the way, for what it was worth. Community Service Officer Dan Phillips arrived shortly, and met with Linner, the two snakes, and a gathering crowd of curious onlookers. Acting on the advice of his supervisors, Phillips explained there was nothing he could do. He was told that police procedure forbid officers from interfering with wild animals, even those that are dangerous and rarely, if ever, seen in Lake Oswego.
Among those in the crowd was retired Lakeridge High School counselor Jack Bramsman. Bramsman asked Phillips if they’d be allowed to deal with the snakes themselves; Phillips told the group he didn’t want to be a witness to any snake vigilantism, and left.
As dusk settled over the field, a shovel-wielding construction worker from across the street killed the first snake. Mishler, borrowing the shovel, dispatched the second.
Onlooker Tracy Marks could barely believe what she’d seen.
“I don’t know why she didn’t get bit,” Marks said, referring to Mishler’s handling of the rattler.
Mishler summed up her actions succinctly.
“More guts than brains, sometimes.”
***
Tuesday’s episode of the great snake affair started slowly, as official sources knew next to nothing of the previous evening’s goings-on.
By 12:30 p.m., reporters from two different newspapers and a television news crew had arrived, finding little but a 10 by 20 yard patch of grass cordoned off with yellow tape and “Caution: rattlesnakes found in this area” signs, along with two groundskeepers from the Lake Oswego School District.
Groundskeeper Ron Bleeck wasn’t convinced there’d been a rattlesnake at all.
“I’m lucky if I see a garter snake,” Bleeck said. “That’s why I was like, ‘Yeah, right.’”
But, Bleeck was ready to believe that an escaped rattlesnake might have taken up residence in the hundreds upon hundreds of golf-ball sized mole holes that run up the third base line of the dry, grassy field. His theory — perhaps the snakes arrived in a bale of hay, transported from eastern Oregon to the llama farm at the southern edge of the campus.
Police were somewhat skeptical too.
“I seriously doubt they were rattlesnakes,” said LOPD spokesman Lt. Terry Timeus Tuesday morning, prior to speaking with Officer Phillips. “They couldn’t live in this weather.”
Randy Shilling, the operations manager of Eden Advanced Pest Technologies, was brought in to provide an expert’s opinion. Shilling said that rattlesnakes are not indigenous to the greater Portland area, and that in 10 years in the local pest control business, he hadn’t taken a single call to investigate a rattler.
Shilling thought the snakes might have been misidentified — a gopher snake, he said, resembles a rattle-snake and can make noises that mimic the rattlers rattle — but opted to suspend judgement until he saw a snake with his own eyes.
“Someone supposedly killed a snake,” Shilling said. “But they can’t produce a body, or a head, or a rattle, or anything.”
With little to do for much of the afternoon, groundskeepers swapped snake stories with the media. Groundskeeper Byron Ek showed off the rattlesnake trap he’d built for the occasion, a Diet Pepsi can with a few pieces of gravel inside, dangling from a string. Ek said he’d used such a trap in the past — shaking the can above a suspected rattlesnake nest will provoke the snake to strike, but it will be unable to remove its fangs from the aluminum skin of the can.
The grisly confirmation came shortly before 3 p.m., with the discovery of two diced-up snakes, lying side by side in a small hole on the Lakeridge construction site. Shilling was called back to the site, and deter-mined that the carcasses were indeed those of rattlesnakes. Ek collected the remains, and transported them to a refrigerated storage facility at the district’s maintenance headquarters.
“All day long we’ve been trying to get a positive ID, where are these snakes, are they really rattlesnakes, whatever,” said Nancy Duin, spokeswoman for the school district. “So we decided for the time being we’d better keep them on hand so we’d know what we’ve got up there. And if we have more, I don’t know.”
Later Tuesday afternoon, Linner Mishler came forward to tell her side of the story.
***
Mishler was coaching her daughter’s soccer team on the lower field at Lakeridge when she was swept into what, in the end, would become her personal snake saga.
Two men in their late teens or early 20s came down from the upper field, south of the school just across Overlook Drive, and asked her if she had a cell phone. They’d told her they’d seen rattlesnakes.
“My first thought was like, ‘No way,’” Mishler said. “My second thought was, ‘Well, I wanna see.’”
Joining the two men, Mishler headed up the hill, where they found two snakes, one coiled up near the top of the ridge, the other slowly moving west, winding its way across the slope of the hill.
They were snakes, without a doubt. But were they rattlers? As if on cue, the coiled up snake rattled its tail. Mishler whipped out her cell phone and called police.
As a small audience gathered, the traveling snake had paused, but the coiled up snake was now on the move. As it ducked into a hole, Mishler sprang into action.
Grabbing a short stick, she approached the escaping snake.
“I was like, how are the police going to kill it if it disappears? So I stuck (the stick) down here and held the snake for a little while. And then he finally got loose. So I grabbed his tail — I can’t believe I did that — and held him.
“I tried to pull him out, but his scales act like barbs, so they don’t come out. I could feel him relax, so I started to pull him out. And when he got about halfway out, I backed off because I didn’t want anything to do with the other end of him.”
Police arrived, not wanting to have anything to do with either end of either snake. When they left, the crowd took matters into its own hands.
Mishler, whose only experience with snakes had been as a child — she used to collect garter snakes to frighten a neighbor — put the executions on hold to allow her 9-year-old son and her husband to get out to Lakeridge.
“The one I killed, I hacked to death. Guts everywhere,” Mishler said, noting it took her four shovel strikes to chop the snake in half. “But the other one, the guy got him nice and clean behind the head.”
Even as Mishler admits her actions — particularly grabbing the snake by the tail — were impulsive and largely foolish, she says she’d do it again. Now that she’s learned that police aren’t willing to get involved in the snake removal business, she says she’s probably even more likely to do it herself. She’s even checked to make sure she has a shovel in her van.
“I was really disappointed in the police that they can’t do anything about it. There’s kids here, what do you mean you can’t do anything about it!” she said. “It’s a dangerous animal. If there’s a mad dog or a mad raccoon — raccoons live here — there’s a raccoon with rabies and it’s chasing people, are you going to let it go because it’s native?”
***
Police have since apologized for the way they dealt with Mishler’s call.
“It was the wrong way to handle the situation. He (Phillips) should have taken care of the situation,” said Lt. Timeus. “Humans always come before animals.”
Timeus said the department’s policy on dealing with wild animals typically comes into play with deer or elk — but poisonous snakes, he said, should be dealt with differently. He expects the department will try to clarify its policy on dealing with snakes. Timeus said that the officer should have tried to capture the snakes to transport them to a safe location or, as a last resort, kill the snakes.
“Obviously, we’re going to respond and assist in any way we can,” Timeus said. “But there’s nothing really the police can do for rattlesnake abatement.”
Still, the big question remains: what are rattlesnakes doing at Lakeridge High School?
Theories abound. Tracy Marks, witness to the beheadings, says she believes there are more snakes, and won’t walk in the area any more.
“I think these two are mom and dad,” Marks said. “I think there’s probably more babies.”
Lt. Timeus suspects the snakes arrived in a shipment of lumber or other construction equipment delivered to the high school. Mishler has her own theory.
“It just seems like probably somebody just had them as exotic pets, and they don’t want them anymore so they tossed them out,” she said. “My husband was joking that maybe it was somebody from L.O. (high school) dropping them off at Lakeridge.”
It’s possible there are additional snakes. Tom Pohl, who lives across the street from the high school on Ridge Lake Drive, says he saw two small rattlesnakes flattened in the road about a year ago. One man who came by at the height of the excitement Monday — Mishler can’t remember his name, but he was walking a big black lab named Moose — said he recently spotted a rattlesnake cruising through the ditch on Stafford Road.
Dr. Jim Shultz, a veterinarian at Greenway Pet Clinic in Beaverton, says he would guess that the snakes unwittingly hitched a ride on a vehicle that stopped in Lake Oswego. While rattlers are not native to the area — they don’t care for the moisture — Shultz said they’d do just fine here during the hot, dry summer months.
Shultz said it’s unlikely, but possible that if the snakes found just the right place, they might be able to establish a nest here.
“The other thing about snakes is, that they are very adaptive,” Shultz said. “If pushed into a corner, I’ve seen them survive in some very unconventional conditions.”
Still, he says there’s no reason to be alarmed.
“It’s great if you’re going to sketch a sci-fi movie, ‘Are the snakes going to start breeding and take over Lake Oswego?’” Shultz said. “Probably not.”
The school district plans to leave the hill taped off and keep an eye open for any future snake activity.
“They’re difficult to trap,” said Duin, the district spokeswoman. “He (Shilling, the pest control specialist) said there’s stuff you can put down there to repel them, but then you’re just repelling them to another area. And that’s not a good solution either.”
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KATU 2 (Portland, Oregon) 28 August 03 Snakes on the loose 'rattle' Lake Oswego residents
Lake Oswego: People in Lake Oswego are keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes that may be on the loose.
Three of the lethal reptiles were spotted near a baseball field at Lakeridge High School Monday evening.
Two college students and a soccer coach at the school killed two of the rattlers, but a third hasn't been seen since.
Rattlesnakes are not native to western Oregon so experts have no idea where they could have come from.
Since the snakes were found on school grounds, school leaders are taking the danger seriously.
"This is certainly something we weren't expecting to find," said Nancy Duin from Lake Oswego School District. "Rattlesnakes on school property is not something we want to hear about. We we're trying to get the word out, to let people know there could be a problem, make sure people are being cautious."
School leaders say they are now hearing reports of other snake sightings in the area recently, including one that was run over.
They say there could be additional snakes on the loose in the Lake Oswego area.
http://www.katu.com/news/story.asp?ID=60244