Jason Clark was 7 when he caught his first snake.
It was a 2-foot garter snake he found in his family’s backyard in Griffin, Ga. As soon as Clark saw it, he wanted it. He’d been telling his mother he wanted a snake for some time; she just refused to let him have one.
Now he had found one on his own. He had no idea what kind it was or whether it was poisonous. He grabbed it, put it in a bucket, and showed it to his dad when his father came home from work.
His dad identified it as an eastern garter snake, and told Clark to let it go. But with his new friend, Clark could not part. He stayed out in the yard, playing with it.
The snake bit him nine times, and he loved it. “I thought it was the coolest thing,” he recalled. He was so excited that he ran inside, the snake still in his bloody hands, and showed his mother.
She got excited, too, but for different reasons.
Oxbow’s new man
A quarter-century later, Clark, 32, is still handling snakes, but now he’s doing it for a living, at his family business, Southeastern Reptile Rescue, and at Columbus State University’s Oxbow Meadows Environmental Learning Center, where last fall he was hired to be the wildlife coordinator.
Visitors can see Clark handle snakes there at 2 p.m. Saturday during the 3535 S. Lumpkin Road center’s annual “Reptile Fest,” from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. A 30-foot “Reptile Wagon” will display native reptiles such as gopher tortoises, alligators and venomous and non-venomous snakes, including exotic species.
Folks who don’t get to see Clark handle snakes Saturday can watch him on TV Monday night, in the first of a three-night Animal Planet series called “SnakesKin.”
An Animal Planet crew tagged along as Clark and his kin went about their family reptile rescue business, which is still based in Griffin, his hometown.
Clark said each TV episode is 30 minutes long, and each Monday two will be shown consecutively 10-11 p.m. through April 26.
At times the business got so busy he and the crew got little sleep and even less food, he said. They’d be up at dawn for breakfast, but be out on calls until midnight, with no time to stop and eat.
It was during this time that Clark paid his first visit to Oxbow Meadows, home to snakes, turtles and an alligator named Wally. A former Oxbow director decided to get rid of all those critters, so who did she call?
Jason Clark.
The TV crew was there in the summer of 2008 to record Clark collecting Oxbow’s animals, including Wally the alligator. Wally turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as Clark had been told the gator was about 4 feet long.
In fact Wally by then was 5 feet 7 inches, snout to tail, so Clark had to squeeze the gator into the box he’d brought, which was 4 1/2 feet long.
Wally today remains the biggest gator Clark has on his 5 acres near Griffin, where the snake-catcher cares for a whole menagerie of critters, 125 in all, including pigs, goats, turkeys, turtles and of course, snakes.
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