WASHINGTON -- Think your coworkers are animals?
Take a look at what employees put up with at some of NASA's far-flung field centers, where technology and nature bump heads, sometimes with bizarre results.
Workers at the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, for example, are being warned to watch out for poisonous Mojave Green rattlesnakes and sidewinders now that warm weather has arrived.
"Long pants and high boots are not just cowboy duds for show. In the desert, they can mean the difference between a snakebite and a close call," news chief Fred Johnson warned employees in Dryden's in-house newspaper The X-Press.
As if rattlers on the prowl weren't bad enough, Dryden workers also are admonished not to feed birds or rabbits on the center. The food could attract coyotes, and even more snakes.
Across the country, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA workers are used to seeing alligators, wild pigs and deer roaming the grounds within sight of the space-shuttle launch pads. The center is located within the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
"It's a jungle out here," said Bruce Buckingham, a center spokesman. "But we know we're sharing space with critters that have been here long before we were. So we take care to keep them out of harm's way."
When animals become a nuisance, they are either shooed away or captured and released.
Boeing workers in April had to call in two licensed trappers to cart off an alligator that was found inside a 5-foot-(1.5-meter-) deep trench in a Delta 4 facility under construction at the Cape Canaveral Air Station. It took six men to extract the 10-foot- (3-meter-) long gator, which was estimated to be 25 years old.
Wildlife once got in the way of a shuttle launch. In June 1995, the scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on STS 70 had to be delayed a month because woodpeckers had poked holes in the foam insulation on the shuttle's giant, bullet-shaped external tank.
It took a horde of volunteers -- known as "pecker checkers" -- to keep the birds at bay with sirens, air horns and balloons while technicians repaired the insulation.
"It's a jungle out here. But we know we're sharing space with critters that have been here long before we were. So we take care to keep them out of harm's way."
Out west, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, six Longhorn cattle stroll the grounds of the sprawling center that is home to Mission Control.
The cattle, which are confined to a 60-acre tract with pastures and ponds, are part of an education project between the center and local schools designed to teach students about science, math and technology through agriculture.
All the cattle, about 16-18 years old, are former champion Longhorns.
There's more than just cattle on the center's range. Raccoons and armadillos also find a home there.
At the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the critters are a bit more benign -- mostly geese and white-tailed deer.
But their burgeoning numbers are causing problems. The sidewalks and grounds are peppered with goose droppings and cars have accidentally hit deer. The center is working with state and federal officials to develop some kind of plan to control the animal population.
At NASA Headquarters, in the heart of the nation's capital, no such delicate measures are needed to handle the wildlife.
Maintenance workers simply set poison traps outside the building to deal with the biggest menace -- rats.
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