In legends, snakes and scaly creatures always play the bad guy. The second definition for reptile in Webster’s dictionary is “a mean, sneaky, groveling person.”
Garth Pithan of Longview is out to change all that.
He asked for a lizard when he was in first grade, Pithan said. “I’ve had some critter that creeps or crawls every day since.”
Now 39, the RAL graduate works for Consolidated Electrical Distributors by day and tends more than 50 reptiles by night.
“I don’t have cable TV,” Pithan said “I’ve got the nature channel right here in my basement.”
Down here, though, it’s really live.
Pithan can watch a tiger salamander give birth, a bright green tree snake shed its skin or a boa constrictor methodically digest a rodent.
His 70-pound tortoise, Bowser, trundles outside to graze on grass and chomp apples.
His Black Throat Monitor lizard, Hannibal, is a giant relative of the Komodo Dragon. It inches along a curly maple branch and sticks out its shiny pink forked tongue.
“They smell with their tongues,” Pithan said.
The lizards pick up a scent and feed it back to their nasal passage through two holes in the roof of their mouths called “the Jacobson organ,” he said. Why a forked tongue? Sensing smell with both forks helps the reptile better locate the source.
Those are the kinds of details Pithan shares at local workshops, birthday parties and presentations under his business name, The Reptile Roadshow.
Exotic beauties
Crates and aquariums house Pithan’s amazing pets, filling the entire lower floor of his house, where the windows are hung with translucent snake skins. He’s lucky, he said, to have support — including extra hands for clean-up and a fondness for reptiles — from his roommate, Kelly Wolfe.
She and Pithan look after 36 snakes. Four more are in the oven.
Incubator, actually. The three-inch eggs will hatch into ball pythons in 50 to 100 days, depending on the temperature.
Their mother, Malika, curls over the eggs and “vibrates her body to raise the temperature if it gets too cool,” Pithan said. “She’ll pee on the eggs if they need more moisture.”
Snake eggs will shrivel and die if they are not kept moist, he explained.
This is his first experiment with breeding snakes, and he plans to allow several more females in to visit the male ball python.
“I have to cool down the enclosure to emulate hibernation,” Pithan said. After he gets the snake to think it’s hibernating, he gradually warms up the crate, then sets the mood with light and some female companionship.
Pithan knows when snakes are soon going to shed their skins — their eyes turn a cloudy blue and the striking markings on their hides seem to fade. When they shed, “they start at the tip of their nose,” he said.
Using a stuffed snake with a wide-open mouth, he can show how a snake eats, an amazing lesson in the use of its coils, backward facing teeth and the four quadrants of its mouth.
He describes how a tree python tightens its tail around a branch and extends itself to “catch a bird in midair and suck it down whole,” Pithan said.
Pithan’s snakes eat mice or rats. Other reptiles are fed crickets, worms or vegetables. Their crates are carpeted with ground walnuts or shredded brown coconut, with branches and bowls of water inside.
Every crate has a heat lamp, because reptiles are cold-blooded.
“These are desert animals,” from Africa and South America and Australia, Pithan explained.
Heat is so basic to their survival that he’s prepared for a power outage: The basement has a big brick fireplace where he could build a fire.
It also has a wall of glossy centerfolds — of a bright orange frilled lizard and other exotic beauties from Reptile magazine.
Pithan has added to his menagerie for years, moving beyond pet store purchases to trade shows in Seattle and Portland.
Bowser was a gift from a Lexington family who could no longer feed the growing beast, which eats a head of lettuce and other vegetables every day.
“He will grow to 200 pounds,” Pithan said.
Bowser’s a sulcata tortoise, the third largest species; Leonardo DiCaprio has one for a pet.
Snakes and stars
Three years ago, as a favor to a friend, Pithan agreed to bring snakes to a birthday party in Woodland.
“The kids loved it. I too had a blast. It was so much fun I felt like a thief taking money for it.”
The experience hatched his home business, the only one of its kind in the area, Pithan said.
At a Boy Scout event in Rainier, one of the boys “had stars floating out of his eyes,” said Pithan. “Are you a superhero?” the youngster whispered.
Lizzy Hardwick, 10, took a reptile class from Pithan through Longview Parks and Recreation in August. She wrote in an evaluation that she “loved the program. It helped me feel comfortable around reptiles.”
Pithan likes nothing better than to share these ancient critters — and fight a stereotype almost as old. “I loathe movies like ‘Anaconda’ and ‘Snakes on a Plane,’ ” he said, because they turn reptiles into terrifying threats.
Scanning his rattlers, geckos, Jaba the Toad and Picasso the Western painted turtle, Pithan said, “I love ‘em all.”
