Rattlesnake surprises customers at Home Depot

Mike Cherchuck found more than he was looking for at The Home Depot garden center Friday in Saint Clair.

Cherchuck spied a rattlesnake inside, about 20 feet from the garden center entrance around 11:30 a.m. at the 600 Terry Rich Blvd. store in Schuylkill County.

“It was right there, coiled up, about 5 to 6 feet away from me. It was very unexpected,” Cherchuck, who works as a retail sales manager with The Republican-Herald, said. He estimated it to be nearly 5 feet long and could hear its rattle.

He’d never seen a rattlesnake that close before, and had only seen another one from a distance on the Appalachian Trail.

“It slithered away slowly. There was a younger lady at the checkout and two stock boys. We recommended that they get their manager and close that entrance off, and they did,” he said.

Cherchuck said he wondered if the snake wandered downfrom the mountain or if it came in with some pallets from another location.

Jarom Hone, assistant store manager, said Saturday that the store is unsure how the snake entered.

“We don’t know for sure how it got in there. We made the area safe and got our customers out of the area,” Hone said.

A wildlife management officer was called and successfully removed the snake, he said. No one was hurt and the store remained opened, according to Hone.

Oddly enough, the snake crawled into a cashier enclosure area on its own and was watched there, where it could not escape until the wildlife management officer arrived.

“I had a pest control person come in after the fact,” Hone said. That individual was also unsure how the snake got in.

The Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission is the state agency which oversees reptiles, like the venomous rattlesnake.

According to an article written by Christopher A. Urban on the agency’s website, www.fish.state.pa.us, “If left unprovoked, the timber rattlesnake is actually one of Pennsylvania’s more timid and docile snake species, striking only when cornered or threatened.”

Urban’s article describes the reptile: “This snake has transverse ‘V’-shaped or chevron like dark bands on a gray, yellow, black or brown body color. The tail is completely black with a rattle. The head is large, flat and triangular, with two thermal-sensitive pits between the eyes and nostrils.”

The timber rattlesnake is vulnerable to decline, Urban writes in his piece, “The Timber Rattlesnake: Pennsylvania’s Uncanny Mountain Denizen.”

“The decline of the timber rattlesnake is attributed mainly to human activities related to habitat alteration, overhunting and poaching. Currently, the timber rattlesnake is protected or is a species of concern in more than half the number of states in which it occurs. In Pennsylvania, it is currently listed as a candidate species, which means that it could achieve threatened or endangered status.”