SALISBURY POST (N Carolina) 17 August 05 Stranger leaves deadly rattler with group of Spencer youth (Kathy Chaffin)
Spencer: Novia Gill had an unwelcome guest at her 10th birthday party Monday evening.
She and several cousins and friends were standing in her grandmother's front yard at 1006 N. Salisbury Ave. when a man in a red truck stopped by with a big cooler.
According to her cousins, Derrick and Valerie Mason, who went outside when they saw the truck, he told them he had a rattlesnake in the cooler and asked if they wanted to see it.
They said they did, so the man took the lid off and showed it to them. Derrick, 17, said the snake was rattling the whole time. "He was angry," he said. "He had his mouth wide open."
When the man asked if they wanted the snake, Derrick said Valerie, who is 15, said yes, that she wanted to show it to their grandmother.
By the time Catherine Mason went out to see what was going on with her grandchildren, she said the man was backing out of the driveway, leaving the snake behind in the open cooler. She said she couldn't believe anyone would leave a rattlesnake with young children around.
At his grandmother's request, 18-year-old Cordero Mason put the lid back on the cooler. Derrick said Cordero had to take their 6-year-old cousin inside because he wanted to play with the rattlesnake.
Valerie Gregory, who lives next door to her mother, said none of the children knew the man. "I feel like he was crazy to come up here and give the children a rattlesnake," she said.
Derrick Mason described the man as being white in his mid-30s.
Gregory said she flagged down Officer Steve Bard with the Spencer Police Department and told him there was a rattlesnake in the cooler.
Bard said Tuesday that his understanding was that they had caught the rattlesnake, and he advised them to call Rowan County Animal Control to come get it. He said they didn't say anything about a man dropping it off.
"If they had told me that story," he said, "I would have followed up on it, believe me. I was not told that."
Animal Control Officer Pat Leonard went to get the snake, but left it in the cooler until Tuesday morning for Officer Manager Fran Pepper to open. Pepper, an animal control officer for five years, is used to handling snakes, having had a ball python and red-tail boa constrictor as pets.
Pepper said she used a pair of snake grabbers to remove the 3-and-a-half-foot rattler from the cooler. "I was able to get it behind the head with my hands and pick it up," she said.
The timber rattlesnake was injured and agitated, according to Pepper.
"Whoever captured it apparently tried to sever its head," she said, "and it sustained a life-threatening wound. I don't know if it's going to make it through the evening. It's not doing too good right now."
Pepper said a timber rattlesnake is not typically aggressive unless provoked. "That's what the rattler is for to try to scare you away before it strikes," she said.
"I'm more scared of the person who dropped it off than I am the snake," she said. "That's scary. If it were my children outside, I would be mortified that somebody dropped a poisonous snake off for children to play with."
Throughout the day Tuesday, Pepper said she took the rattler out of the animal carrier three times, and it only struck once after she had put it back inside. "It just hit the side of the carrier," she said.
Bob Pendergrass, the nature center supervisor at Dan Nicholas Park, said timber rattlesnakes have been found in the northeastern part of Rowan County around the Tuckertown Reservoir.
"But as far as being common in our county, they're not," he said.
Timber rattlesnakes are more toxic than copperheads, he said, because their venom is both hemotoxic, affecting the blood, and neurotoxic, affecting the nervous system.
Because it was injured and had been bounced around in a cooler on the back of a truck, Pendergrass said the snake could have been agitated enough to strike at one of the children.
The toxicity of the venom has to do with a person's body weight, he said, so a smaller person would have suffered more from a bite than a larger one.
Even if the snake had been dead, Pendergrass said it could have posed a danger if a child, for example, had put a finger in its mouth. "They can have muscle spasms and bite on reflex," he said.
Based on what he had heard from Pepper, Pendergrass said he didn't think the snake would survive. "Snakes have a very slow metabolism," he said, "and they're slow to die. It sounds to me like the snake's neck was broken."
In the state of North Carolina, timber rattlesnakes are considered a threatened species and are protected by law unless they pose a danger to someone.
"Generally, they wouldn't bother anybody like I said if you leave them alone," he said.
Stranger leaves deadly rattler with group of Spencer youth