Rattlesnake wanting to read is found outside Auntie's Bookstore

Auntie's Bookstore employees are experts in stories, not snakes.

So when the store's events coordinator Terri Ness was alerted by customers that a rattlesnake was slithering around the sidewalk last week, she walked outside to investigate.

Snakes don't bother her, Ness said.

"But I certainly wasn't gonna catch it myself."

As Ness made call after call to get someone to remove the snake, which had eventually nestled itself into someone's car tire, she became a sort of de-facto traffic cop.

"I stayed outside by the car to keep an eye on the snake. We were directing people around it," Ness said with a laugh.

Ness continued to call wildlife agencies for help, but was transferred by automated systems back and forth.

"It was a lot of phone tag. Thankfully we knew the person who owned the car." Ness said. Out of sheer coincidence, the owner had a friend who loved snakes.

"He reached out to his friend. He had been handling snakes for decades," Ness said. "He was able to come out. He had a snake hook and a terrarium, and he safely released it back into the wild."

It's unclear where the snake came from. The Spokesman-Review attempted to reach the snake Wednesday but was unsuccessful.

Ness was told the snake appeared to be a rattlesnake, nothing anyone in the store has dealt with before. The animals that bookstore employees most often see fluttering in and out are birds.

"The bird in the store before ... I'm the one that caught that, too. We've seen other (wildlife) outside, like a beaver," Ness said. "But it's birds we interact with the most, not snakes."

Someone who does interact the most with snakes is Hunter Sheffield, a Spokane snake expert and owner of Northwest Terraria, a reptile store. He sees rattlesnakes the most in areas like Cheney, Airway Heights and Green Bluff. Sometimes, people will catch a snake, call Sheffield and try to leave the snake with him.

"I tell them it's illegal to keep captured wildlife and there's nothing I can do," he said. "If someone already caught it, like this woman last week who had it in a bucket, I told her to take it to a safe place and let it loose."

Sheffield has loved animals all his life, but things really ramped up once he left the Air Force. He began collecting reptiles and selling them or showing them at local expos.

"If I was rich, I'd keep big mammals," he said. "But I'm not rich, so reptiles are where it is."

Sheffield said Spokane doesn't have a huge rattlesnake problem. What is more of a problem is people misidentifying other snakes as rattlesnakes and killing them. While gopher snakes will bite if threatened, they are not venomous.

"The gopher snakes around here are going to eat rodents and not cause harm to anyone, but people still choose to kill it," he said. "You are putting yourself in more harm's way as opposed to walking away and leaving it alone."

So if any Spokane residents happen to see a snake slithering around downtown again in the future, Sheffield's advice for them is simple:

"Leave it alone. If you mess with it, you'll probably get bit."

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This story was originally published July 1, 2026 at 7:06 PM.