My Wife Had a Visitor

Vaughn McMillan

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Got a text yesterday evening from Kian telling me she moved a large flower pot in her front yard and found this guy hanging out underneath...

Kian's%20King%20Snake.jpg



She had her phone with her, so she was able to snap a quick pic. She said that by the time she went and got a broom to shoo it away, it had already left. It amazes me that the same girl who will casually take a photo of a deadly, man-eating California King Snake is the same person who goes running away in panic when she sees a grasshopper. :rolleyes: Me, I'll catch the grasshopper and play with it, whereas the snake will make me run away and scream like a little girl. :eek:
 
over on the IAP they would all be lamenting that she didn't skin it so you could make snake skin pens from it.


A few years back we lived just off a bayou that fed into Lake Houston and we were only about 1/2 a mile from the lake, I came home and my wife told me she had killed a rattlesnake in the front flower bed... at that time we had 3 cats that spent a lot of time out doors and one of them wanted to take on the snake... my wife insisted it was a rattlesnake, but when I pulled its head out of the ground where she had buried it with the point of the shovel..She had driven its head about 6 or 8 inches into the dirt... it was actually a cottonmouth... more deadly and more aggressive than a rattler.
 
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if my wife ever, saw that anywhere near our property, she would call the swat team. 10 minutes later she would put our house up for sale.

they give me the eebie jeebies also, but I would probably freeze for a second, then slowly walk away.
I admit Id probably get my Mossberg out and not go outside again until it moved.
 
if my wife ever, saw that anywhere near our property, she would call the swat team. 10 minutes later she would put our house up for sale.

I used to get quite a few snakes in the back yard at my last house, usually caught them with the push mower. I was carrying a dead one around the house to my trash can one day and ran into my neighbor George. I simply told him, "Don't tell my wife, I won't tell yours." ;)
 
I hate snakes! Can't tolerate them at all.
We have timber rattlers in NH, fortunately very few in our neck of the woods. Many years ago I was hunting deer & decided to try a different area. I had to crawl under a cattle fence & was about halfway through when I noticed some motion about 10' away. It was a rattler. It stopped & coiled, but no rattling. I backed out from under the fence & switched from a 12 ga. slug to buckshot, used it, & continued the hunt. Occasionally, when I see those TV shows about snakes in FL, I think about that episode, wondering what would have happened if I hadn't noticed it.
 
Ten feet away, Al? You were probably safe. It wouldn't slide up and attack you; you're too big for it to eat.
Roger, I wasn't concerned about being "eaten". I was surprised (my first encounter with a rattler) & didn't want to get bit! My dislike/hatred of those crawly things :eek: makes me respond in a way to remove the concern. I shiver just thinking about the damn things!
 
Snakes don't bother me at all, but I have Marie Antoinette'd a few of the nastier looking ones with my shovel before.

I have however, been known to run away screaming like a little girl from bigass spiders though.:eek:
 
didnt realize cotton mouths were in texas chuck??? and yes they are mean critters..

Oh we have lots of them kind of critters in Texas... Cottonmouth is just another name for water moccasin and they tend to live in and around swampy water areas... Houston is built on a swamp ... when I was a young'n we visited a cousin that lived in Coolidge, TX... his son and I went down to the local reservoir and spent the afternoon and a couple boxes of .22 long rifles shooting snakes... the reservoir was full of them.
 
When my wife and I visited Harper's Ferry, years and years ago, one of the things I remember is a dark coloured snake swimming vigourously upstream in a brook. Judging by the reading I just did, this was likely a cottonmouth, no?
 
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