Sacramento’s Snake Festival teaches snake safety and appreciation of snakes
Snake handlers, snake logos and rattlesnakes in tubes? Welcome to the Save The Snakes fifth Sacramento Snake Festival at Hagen Community Park in Rancho Cordova.
The annual festival celebrates the “world’s most interesting and misunderstood animals,” a.k.a. the snake community, according to the website for SnakeFest 2026.
The May 2 event featured education booths, live demonstrations and opportunities to learn and meet some of the reptiles that comprise California’s large snake population.
Michael Starkey, founder and executive director of Save The Snake, said this year’s festival was particularly important due to the recent uptick in snake related deaths in the state. So far this year there have been three deaths due to snake bites in California, which is unusually high for the area.
Starkey said that although the rise in snake related deaths is surprising, he is familiar with the fear-based stigma snakes carry. The festival’s origins began as a result of the conflict between humans and snakes and the effort to teach people how to peacefully coexist with them.
“The Sacramento snake festival is an opportunity to ignite people’s interests and curiosities and even to debunk some myths or superstitions they may have, and hopefully create a little bit of maybe excitement or understanding at least about these animals,” said Starkey.
Some of those myths surround what to do if you’re bitten by a venomous snake. Festival-goers were advised to never try to suck venom out of a bite, but to instead stay calm, call 9-1-1, and try to keep the part of the body where the snakebite occurred at heart level to minimize tissue damage and swelling.
Other safety tips included don’t hike off trail, and give the animal plenty of room.
One of the educators, Heather Lindsay, sat under a large tent holding a colorful snake during the festival. Lindsay is a guide for Sacramento Splash, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children understand and value the natural world.
The Splash exhibit was surrounded by kids and parents as they touched and held three different kinds of nonvenomous snakes. Lindsay said education and live demonstrations are some of the best ways to help people overcome their fear of snakes and replace that fear with curiosity.
“The more people who learn about the environment, the more likely they are to protect it,” said Lindsay. “So teaching these people, giving them an experience, and then teaching them [about snakes] makes them appreciate it. They can take care of their world better.”
The festival’s major event was a live rattlesnake demonstration and Q&A, where Starkey and a volunteer produced a Northern Pacific Rattlesnake named Lucky Strike from a white cloth bag. The team used a clear plastic cylinder, or snake restraining tube, to allow Lucky Strike partial refuge while still allowing members of the audience to safely touch its scales.
Elsewhere at the festival, a large canvas was being painted by local artist Joey Rose using streaks of bright red and black.
Rose has proudly created every logo since the festival’s inception, each with its own snake, from a king cobra to the giant garter snake, which is the official snake of California. This year, Rose created a logo displaying a majestic Black Mamba to help emphasize the global snake conservation efforts of Save the Snake.
For Rose, it’s important to show the beauty of these reptiles, so people can take the time to better understand their ecosystems and the community of animals who reside in them.
“We need to respect snakes and realize that the snakes aren’t bad,” said Rose. “They’re not essentially evil, they’re part of the ecosystem, just like we are, we should be protecting them as well.”
