Record number of rattlesnakes removed in this Alberta city

Lethbridge's rattlesnake wrangler got a lot of calls this season. Ryan First Diver was called to remove over 200 snakes in the southern Alberta city. This year has been the most. It's a service the city of Lethbridge has been running for 30 years. And not all of them are rattlesnakes either. Some are non-venomous constrictors like bull snakes. How can you tell? The dead giveaway is that rattle. If the snake is on public property, that's when First Diver gets a call. But it's all about conservation. He says he moves the snakes to a permanent natural habitat area. Only in the past five to ten years have we started getting more and more calls on this side of the river. Usually they were kind of isolated to the west side, but I think because of development projects at the University of Lethbridge and neighboring subdivisions like Riverstone and in the canyons. It's taking up rattlesnake hunting habitat. But he also says there are a lot of misconceptions about the reptiles. As long as you're... Aware of your surroundings and not accidentally stepping on one, you're pretty safe. I've moved thousands of snakes, it's never happened to me. Not a single rattlesnake has tried to get me. One environmental conservationist agrees. He says they're generally harmless. And there has never been a fatal rattlesnake bite in Alberta. The number of instances where people are bitten are very rare. And snakes do not strike aggressively, not in their interest to bite. He is working to better understand why there are more rattlesnakes in Lethbridge recently, but says it's hard to count. Our limited data can tell that there's a large number of dens, you know, over 100, but we don't know yet how well the population is doing. Alberta Environment hopes to have a better sense of how the snakes are faring there over the next 10 years.