Many of y’all have skilled this blood runs chilly second in Austin: You’re minding your individual business and instinctively look down when hastily, you discover a coiled-up ball of terror close to your toes.
Holy crap, is {that a} toxic Diamondback or only a docile rat snake? Your adrenaline is pumping, and each fight-or-flight intuition you possess springs to life. (I humbly counsel that flight is the wisest reply right here.)
If you’re fortunate sufficient to reside in Circle C Ranch (please stick with me right here), salvation is simply a name or textual content away within the type of citizen/hero Mark Nordstrom, a soft-spoken utilized supplies engineer doubling as native snake wrangler, who will reply shortly to collect up your thriller serpent and humanely relocate it to its pure habitat—aka any space regulation agency.
It’s a favourite pastime of locals to pine away for the bygone days of quirky, uniquely Austin issues. So, after I realized that one exists within the type of Nordstrom, getting his story turned a precedence. Naturally, I used to be initially interested in how he acquired into the snake wrangling sport within the first place. After all, it’s not one thing that children see on their profession day in school.
“I grew up here in Austin, so I’ve been catching everything that walked or crawled since I was a kid. Handling snakes was something that I was familiar with,” Nordstrom says. “But about eight years ago, a lady got onto our neighborhood Facebook page, and she was frantically looking for someone to remove a snake that had gotten into her house. And I reached out to here and said, ‘Hi, can I help?’ From there it just kind of blossomed into something that it is today.”
His status as a Circle C serpent buster unfold out sooner than a den of hungry rattlers, and shortly he was, unequivocally, the neighborhood’s Snake Batman, getting calls and texts in any respect hours from scores of determined individuals, finally placing up his personal non-public Facebook web page to extend his accessibility.
“During peak times, I can get up to 20 calls in a week—roughly three a day. I have some special tools to catch a snake without harming it. From the time I get a call, I can get anywhere in Circle C in about five minutes. Once I locate the snake… I’m looking for escape routes where it can get away from me. And from there it’s just a matter of opening a container with a lid on it and getting the snake in there and putting the lid back on.”
I used to be considerably fascinated by the following steps of what occurs to the serpent as soon as it’s trapped. I’d be contemplating dropping it off at an enemy’s home, however the mild-mannered Nordstrom takes a distinct tact.
“That’s the hard part. I have a variety of different places. Over there off of Southwest Parkway in that big LCRA property, that’s one of the places that I will take them sometimes. They’ll have lots of room to roam,” he says.
Nordstrom concedes that it’s getting more and more troublesome to discover a good place to deliver the snakes because of the speedy progress and improvement of Southwest Austin, seeming a bit winsome in regards to the lack of so many wild areas close to his home.
In a gilded Austin period the place costs for all the pieces from queso to toll lanes are skyrocketing, it’s refreshing to study that the volunteer doesn’t cost for his distinctive service. He’s by no means requested for even a dime, though Nordstrom concedes that some of us have given him presents and donations—and his charitable streak has its limits.
“It’s got to be a paying gig if I’m going out into North Austin or something like that.” He additionally famous that he’d must cost in a scenario with a number of serpents, similar to a den.
“You don’t bite the snakes back?” I ask.
“I do not,” Nordstrom replies earnestly, ignoring my try at humor. Snakes are a lethal severe matter for this man, and he doesn’t let his guard down about it simply.
I observe up: “So if, hypothetically, you got a rattlesnake call from someone in Westlake, you could charge them, like, $20,000—which is also known as the price of one parking spot at Westlake High School.”
Nordstrom lastly breaks, laughing at my less-weird-than-it-sounds question.
“Right,” he says with a chuckle, even when I do know he’d possible give even a rich Westlake buyer a extremely whole lot. It’s simply how he’s wired. None of that is for private achieve; it’s to guard individuals and snakes from dangerous outcomes.
Having seen our dialog soften a bit, I probe additional.
“You’re in Circle C—you ever gotten a snake-wrangling call from a swinger party?”
He ruminates thoughtfully on my question, clearly conscious of his standing in that group, earlier than saying, “I have not. No upside-down pineapples yet.”
Mark Nordstrom, possibly we’re not so completely different in spite of everything.
In closing, I ask the wrangler for one piece of recommendation that he’d give to anybody who comes throughout a snake of their yard.
“Get your camera out and send me a pic and in a few seconds, I can tell you if it’s something you need to be worried about or not.”
I briefly think about a swinger joke callback however suppose the higher of it out of respect for a severe man doing a severe job.
“I enjoy getting the snakes. I enjoy people’s reactions. I usually put [the snakes] in clear containers so people can get up close to them. When I get a snake, the whole neighborhood finds out, and it’s like a gathering of kids and parents that want to see what I caught,” he notes.
So, if anybody studying this occurs to bump into a snake in Southwest Austin, the reply for you seems clear.
Who you gonna name? Mark Nordstrom.
