Monday, September 21, 2015

Close Encounters of the Snake Kind

This past weekend, we had a chance to get a little bit up close and personal with one of the four types of rattlesnakes that live where we do.

First, on Friday afternoon, Kevin said he saw it while he was parking his car.  In hindsight, he probably should have run it over once or twenty times.

Then, while I was walking the dog, in the dark, at 5:30 AM on Saturday morning (thanks ever so much for waking me up, Tik - wait, do dogs even get sarcasm?), I heard it.  It was so much louder than I expected a rattlesnake to sound.  But I was standing next to the garage and the building by ours, and I could tell that the sound was coming from the far side of our building.  We didn't go over there.

Later on Saturday morning, once the sun had come up and the kids were awake, we found the rattlesnake on the sidewalk by our neighbor's door.  It had been in a really nasty fight.  Its head and rattler were torn off, and a huge bite had been taken out of its middle, almost severing the snake in two.  And there was blood!  So much blood dried on the concrete showing where the fight had happened, and where the snake had slithered before finally stopping.

Once it was nice and dead, the kids and I identified it as a prairie rattlesnake.  As I mentioned before, that's one of the four rattlesnakes that live here.  It is venomous.  I assume that whatever dog it tussled with ended up at the vet on Saturday morning, getting a nice dose of anti-venom.  Hopefully it's alright.

1 comment:

Our Blessed Journey said...

oooh, yes, snakes....I never heard of "snake season" prior to moving south....which means, don't walk through our backyard forest in the warm weather. I heard we have rattle snakes here, nothing like TX I'm sure...but I'm durn glad not to have encountered one yet....we have run into coral snakes....mostly I just see corn snakes and black racers...I'm getting used to them now:)