The Hills Were Always Full of Them
Easter Sunday came warm to Camarillo. People were outside, at family gatherings, on trails, in backyards. Around four in the afternoon, a man was near a vehicle at an outdoor event close to CSU Channel Islands when a rattlesnake bit him. His friends loaded him into a car and drove toward the hospital, calling 911 on the way. Paramedics intercepted them at Pleasant Valley Road and Lewis Road. He survived.
It was the sixth rattlesnake bite reported in Ventura County in less than a month. In all of 2025, the county recorded nine.
Two of the spring's bites were fatal. On March 14, Gabriela Bautista, a 46-year-old Moorpark woman described by her family as a devoted wife, mother, and passionate hiker, was bitten at midday on a trail at Wildwood Regional Park in Thousand Oaks. She was airlifted to the hospital and died five days later, her cause of death confirmed by the Ventura County Medical Examiner as rattlesnake venom toxicity. Weeks earlier, a 25-year-old Costa Mesa man named Julian Hernandez had been bitten while mountain biking in Irvine and died on March 4. Two people, in Southern California, within weeks of each other, before spring had technically started.
The question that followed every one of these stories was the same: why now?
The weather, and something larger
Rattlesnakes don't hibernate the way a bear does. They enter a state called brumation, a cold-induced metabolic dimming in which the body conserves everything and waits. What wakes them is warmth. In a typical year on the Central Coast, that happens in late spring. This year, an unusually warm March, with temperatures sitting in the high seventies and low eighties for stretches at a time, sent snakes out roughly a month early.
A wet winter had done the rest of the setup. Good rains produced abundant plant growth, which produced abundant rodents, which meant the hills around Camarillo were stocked with exactly what a hungry snake needs after months of not eating. Greg Pauly, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told the Los Angeles Times the combination was straightforward: good food sources plus warm temperatures equals more surface activity. The same weather that woke the snakes also sent people onto trails, into parks, and into backyards in large numbers. Two populations, drawn out by the same conditions, finding each other in places neither anticipated.
Emily Taylor, a professor of biology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who studies Pacific rattlesnakes on the Central Coast, told the Los Angeles Times her phone was "ringing off the hook" throughout March, ten to twenty times the volume she normally receives. Her published research in the journal Ecology and Evolution adds a longer view: even modest increases in average temperature, just one to two degrees, improve the thermal quality of rattlesnake habitat and extend how long they are active each year. This spring may be less an anomaly than a rehearsal.
What you've been told is probably wrong
Here is the part of the story that most outlets have not told you, partly because it requires talking to researchers rather than relying on the same seasonal warnings, and partly because the truth is considerably more interesting than the fear.
Nearly everything most people believe about rattlesnakes, and about rattlesnake bites, is either wrong or badly incomplete.
A study published in March 2026 in the journal Toxins, by researchers at Loma Linda University, traced 126 years of newspaper coverage of rattlesnake myths across North America and found that the most commonly repeated claim, that baby rattlesnakes are more dangerous than adults because they cannot control their venom, is false. It has always been false. The myth appears to have originated in California in the late 1960s, spread through the state's news media in the 1970s, and from there traveled across the continent, amplified by the internet, until it became one of the most persistent pieces of wildlife misinformation in the country. Surveys of both students and professionals found that belief in the myth remains remarkably widespread across Southern California to this day.
The truth, according to the Loma Linda study and corroborated by multiple lines of experimental research, is nearly the opposite. Baby rattlesnakes have smaller venom glands. Smaller glands hold less venom. Experimental studies confirm they inject less when biting than adults do. Even accounting for the fact that baby venom of some species is more potent per unit, the lower volume means bites from juveniles are, clinically, less severe. Adult rattlesnakes, with their larger glands and greater muscle mass, are the ones capable of delivering a more dangerous bite.
There is a related phenomenon that is equally misunderstood. Between 20 and 50 percent of rattlesnake bites worldwide result in little or no venom being injected at all. Researchers call these dry bites, and according to peer-reviewed studies published in Toxicon and Toxins, they are not accidents. They are choices. The delivery of venom is entirely voluntary. Rattlesnakes possess a mechanism called venom metering that allows them to regulate exactly how much venom they expend, and research on Northern Pacific rattlesnakes, the species common to this region, has found that defensive strikes, the kind that happen when a human startles a snake, result in more dry bites than predatory ones. The snake, threatened by something too large to eat, frequently opts to conserve its venom rather than waste it.
None of this explains the deaths this spring. What it explains is the vast middle ground of encounters that don't end in death, and why even a bite from a venomous snake is not a guaranteed catastrophe. It also explains why the fear that follows a spring like this one, while understandable, tends to outrun the actual risk.
What to do
Rattlesnakes want nothing to do with people. Taylor told the science podcast Ologies that getting a rattlesnake to bite is genuinely difficult. Their first defense is camouflage. Their second is the rattle, which is not aggression but a request for distance. Biting is a last resort, almost always the result of a snake that was startled, cornered, or directly disturbed.
They are also doing something useful out there. They eat the rodents that carry hantavirus, plague, and Lyme disease. The hills around Camarillo have always been their territory. The evidence suggests, given a warming climate, that territory will only become more productive for them.
If you are bitten, the guidance from the Ventura County Fire Department is unambiguous: get to a hospital. Everything else is secondary, and most of what people instinctively want to do will make things worse.
Do not:
Try to suck out the venom. It doesn't work and introduces bacteria into the wound.
Apply a tourniquet.
Pack the bite in ice.
Drive to the nearest urgent care. Not every facility carries antivenom. Call 911 and let paramedics direct you to one that does.
Do:
Keep the bitten limb at or above heart level. This is counterintuitive but supported by current medical evidence. It allows venom to dilute through the body rather than concentrating at the bite site.
Move quickly. Time matters.
For dog owners.
Dogs are bitten frequently, usually on the face or legs, because dogs investigate interesting smells and rattlesnakes smell extremely interesting. Keep dogs leashed in any area with open space, scrub, or tall grass.
The rattlesnake vaccine for dogs is no longer recommended by veterinary toxicologists. Taylor said in the Ologies interview that she does not give it to her own dog and that the evidence it works was never convincing. Its conditional license was renewed and lapsed repeatedly over the years because researchers could never produce strong experimental results. Rattlesnake avoidance training, which uses live neutralized snakes and an e-collar to teach dogs to recognize and avoid them, has advocates. Talk to your vet.
If a rattlesnake turns up in your yard, Ventura County Animal Services can be reached at (805) 388-4341. There are also volunteer relocation services that will come remove the snake and release it into appropriate habitat. Killing it is not your only option.
The open space around Camarillo, the hills, the trails, the scrub around CSUCI, the land people were moving through on Easter Sunday, has always been full of them. This spring just made that impossible to ignore. Pay attention to where you put your hands. Stay on the trail. And if you come around a corner and hear something start up in the grass that sounds like a small, urgent maraca, stop moving and take a slow step back.
The snake almost certainly wants nothing from you. It has been in these hills for millions of years, long before any of us arrived to be startled by it.
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Sources: Ventura County Fire Department; CBS Los Angeles; KTLA; "Thermal ecology and baseline energetic requirements of a large-bodied ectotherm suggest resilience to climate change," Crowell et al., Ecology and Evolution, May 2021; "Dry bite in venomous snakes: A review," Naik, Toxicon, 2017; "Current Knowledge on Snake Dry Bites," Pucca et al., Toxins, 2020; "Are Baby Rattlesnakes More Dangerous than Adults? Origin, Transmission, and Prevalence of a Media-Driven Myth," Hayes and Morris, Toxins, March 2026; Los Angeles Times interview with Emily Taylor, April 2026; Ologies Podcast, "Crotalology with Dr. Emily Taylor," June 2025.
Gabrielle Ridgeway covers local government and community news for the Camarillo Caller.