ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 18, 1997 TAG: 9703180021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG (AP)
SOURCE: ALISON FREEHLING (NEWPORT NEWS) DAILY PRESS
Living with Bill Hawthorne can be an adventure. A python in the kitchen. Snakes spending the night in the garage - including one such visitor that, when scared, snorted like a pig, flopped around and played dead.
Shelby Hawthorne ran into the latter when she walked into the garage one afternoon to do laundry. Bill, her husband of 33 years, had failed to tell her about the hognose snake he was keeping in a bucket - or of the animal's peculiar habits when frightened.
``It was such a horrible racket,'' she said. ``I thought, `OK, maybe I don't need to do laundry today.' I turned right around.''
Bill Hawthorne, a 54-year-old associate professor of business administration at the College of William and Mary, has been interested in snakes since his childhood on a Brunswick County farm.
Today, he counts educating the public on nature's more unpopular creatures - and trying to save them as development encroaches on their habitats - as a side job.
Since moving to Williamsburg in 1976, Hawthorne estimates he has removed about 100 snakes from houses and other property. He sets the snakes free in swampy, wooded or unpopulated areas.
Hawthorne has also used his catches to make presentations at schools.
``I want children to see that this is an ani-
mal sharing the planet with us, that might be able to teach us something,'' Hawthorne said. ``In most cases, it doesn't bother us. Why should we bother it?''
Many calls for help have come from Hawthorne's neighborhood, where the professor is affectionately known to children as ``The Snake Man.''
Hawthorne has gone to public pools and even a church, where the minister asked him not to breathe a word of the visit.
``I think the way he put it was that he didn't want anyone to know we had `taken serpents from his sanctuary,''' he said.
Nearly all of the snakes that Hawthorne has removed have been nonpoisonous - garter snakes, black snakes, and even one fake, rubber snake that caused a false alarm - although he did pick up a copperhead that was frequenting a swimming pool.
The key to catching any kind of snake, Hawthorne says, is to immobilize its head by grabbing it by the back of the neck. He often uses a stick to help pin down the snake's body.
``There's some adrenaline involved,'' he said. ``You try to be careful, prudent, reasonable, and you manage the risk.''
Hawthorne has been bitten once, by a nonpoisonous python who nipped him after mistaking his hand for a mouse.
Hawthorne was keeping that snake as a favor to a graduate student who could not take it home. The python, the only pet snake Hawthorne has ever had, ended up living in cages in his dining room and kitchen for more than two years before it was returned to its owner.
``It definitely wasn't the first thing I wanted to see every morning,'' Shelby Hawthorne said.
Like his wife, Bill Hawthorne would rather have snakes living out in the wild, where they are a natural part of the food chain and kill unwanted rodents.
Hawthorne has long been curious about snakes. The first time he tried to pick one up, he was about 8 years old and grabbed a green snake by the middle of its back. The snake whipped around and tried to bite him, so Hawthorne dropped it and ran.
The next time he was more successful. Hawthorne grabbed a black snake by the neck and carried it to his front yard.
Hawthorne said children do not have the fear of snakes that most adults have learned. So he tries to prevent that fear in the children he speaks with, who have included his daughters Alice, now 28, and Mary, 23.
``I wouldn't say they necessarily like snakes, but I'd say they have respect for them,'' he said. ``Same as my wife.''
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. William and Mary business professorby CNBBill Hawthorne shows off Boa Derick, a boa constrictor owned by one
of Hawthorne's colleagues in the college's biology department.
color.