doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Just for Stan...

Hmph. Snakes. Tigers and Eastern Browns where I grew up. Thankfully the browns have a tendency to dry strike and tiny fangs, otherwise I wouldn't be here. We often used to lose a sheep or two when moving a mob between paddocks; I suspect due to snake bites.

Our snakes pale in comparison to yours.

My Dad owned a large country store on my Grandaddy's farm. He ran it for 23 years. There was a heater in the middle fo the store with a couple rocking chairs by it and a telephone on a square column behind the heater. Dad got to cutting out newspaper clippings of reports of professional snake handlers who had been bitten, and taping them on the column above the phone............for me to see every time I made a phone call on it. The reason was that I'd gotten into the habit of catching every rattler I could and bringing them home. He was trying to convince me to quit, but I got a big rush out of handling a big rattler, and caught them at every chance. He had hopes the newspaper clippings would dissuade me. But, they didn't. One day I made the mistake of bringing a big one into his store and walking up behind a gentleman of color, who was paying for some stuff at the cash register. When the old snake sang his rattles the man looked around, then broke and ran out the back door of the store. After the tongue lashing I got I never did that again!

I eventually got the message that I was pushing my luck, and stopped bringing them home. A big rattler is still a thrill to handle.

SRH

You like to go to church ever think of going to one of those snake handling churches.

Speaking of dry strikes, I knew a cotton farmer from Waynesboro, GA, our county seat, who had been bitten by rattlers three times and all were dry bites.

A former young employee of mine was a bowhunter, for deer, and hunted the Brier Creek swamp area his grandaddy owns. He would go into the swamp in snake chaps, and was bitten twice on the chaps by rattlers. Both times the snakes fangs got hung in the kevlar stuff and he had to beat them off with an arrow. Gutsy kid to keep going like he did. He was pretty laid back about it all.

SRH

No sir, jOe!

SRH

Stan great bag on the doves and the little gun.
My philosophy on snakes is a good snake is a dead snake! If it looks poisonous it's dead! Endangered or not!, dead!!

I have a friend who says that there are only two kinds of snakes..............chicken snakes and rattlesnakes. He says if he sees a snake and it doesn't have a chicken in it's mouth it's a rattlesnake. Funny.......... but I let 'em go if they ain't in a habitated place. Hope that don't ever "come back to bite me".

SRH

A friend in Florida got bitten by a baby water moccasin (aka Cottonmouth)...She underwent $200K in treatment and anti-bodies. Well, growing up in north Florida we were always told Fla was the only state with all four US poisonous snakes. Just to check out this old wives tales...here is a range map for cottonmouths, copperheads and coral snakes. (Rattlers are everywhere). Never heard of the Texas and Arizona versions of the coral snake. I think copperhead come further down into Florida...I remember seeing one around Gainesville.

I am (barely) in the area for the Coral Snake in GA, but have never seen one. One other strange thing I have found is...............I am about 5 miles north of Brier Creek, and have never seen an Eastern Diamandback on this side of "the creek". But, they definitely do exist from Brier Creek south. All we have here is timber rattlers (canebrakes).

SRH