Come to think about it, it may not have been quite that large, more like 3 1/2', but when you're a kid, something that large transfixed in a striking pose looks mighty big - and grows larger every second. ;-)
Greg G.
Exactly!!! Go figure.
We tried breaking her of her fear with a baby Corn Snake a few years ago but... Alas, no luck.
hehe ... bayou country, Bubba! As in not that far from NOLA. :)
Yeah, just as I hit the send button I remembered your last name and went D'oh! Seriously...
Greg G.
In NC, we had 4 types of poisonous snakes: Copperheads, rattler, coral and cotton mouth, depending on what part of the state you were in. In Raleigh, where we lived, I never saw a coral snake and think they were limited to the southern part of the state. However, having lived one summer as a kid on an island in a southern Arkansas bayou, I KNOW that a cotton mouth looks like and how they act. The experts tell us that they don't exist as far north as Raleigh.
One afternoon, I was walking down the creek behind our home toward the lake. It was about a 1/4mile stroll and I loved looking at the plants growing on the creek bank. As I rounded a corner, I found myself about 10' away from two very fat cotton mouths lounging in a dead tree in the creek. One slid off his branch into the water and started swimming toward me.
Trust me, this old fat boy can walk on water when he's sufficiently motivated. I 'walked' clear back to the house, removing Mr. Browning's 12 gauge from my basement office and returned to the creek. Both of my newfound friends were in their tree again, so I liquefied both, saving the heads to show my friend, who taught Biology at NCSU.
Copperheads were common as dirt in the yard and loved sliding around under the pine straw used as mulch around the house's foundation and naturally in the pine woods. You soon learned that if you were going to remove the cover of a lawn sprinkler's valve box, you did it with a screwdriver since a copperhead would undoubtedly be inside. They'd always just slither away. None of the family ever had a problem with them, other than being surprised by them when you'd scare one up.
While the same fellow who had assured me that there were no cottonmouths in the Raleigh area told me that there WERE rattlers, I never saw any, and the same can be said for coral snakes, though folk would see a King and mistakenly call it a coral. Remember, red against yellow, kill a fellow. Red against black, venom lack.
It's the corals that have a very tiny mouth, but they make up for it with a neurotoxin venom and were considered to be the most deadly of the NC snakes.
As an aside, copperheads took a toll on dogs and particularly on cats.
One of the aggressive snakes - along with the Timber Rattlesnake A large size one. Normally it takes only one lunge to kill.
Mart>> A copperhead is a pit viper, same family as rattlesnakes and cottonmouths,
That's it. Coral snakes were the ones I was thinking of.
>HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.