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chad kilpatrick (Km5qf)
BOC INITIATE
Username: Km5qf
Post Number: 90
Registered: 2-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2005 - 8:55 am: | 
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Ever hear the saying "once bitten twice shy"? Hats off to you Jordan, admittedly youve a lot more exp in playing with snakes than i do.
I avoid cottonmouths whenever possible and nary a one ive encountered just ran away. Theyve always at the least stood their ground and many act like they want a fight. I give em a wide berth and let them be for the most part- are they as good to eat as rattlesnake?
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cq cq de km5qf qrz?
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SAM SHERRY (Sam9266)
 BOC PALADIN
Username: Sam9266
Post Number: 480
Registered: 4-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2005 - 11:21 am: |
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I have found several aggresive cottonmouths before. In fact it is the only snake that actually seems to come at you instead of fleeing at times.
One of the bad things about a cottonmouth is that when they swim the hold their heads way up off the water and will swim right up and over the side of a low setting boat.. trust me.. I know this for a fact. I spotted one crossing the river from about 60 yards away while I was anchored and sure enough.. he swam right into the eddie at the back of the boat near the gas motor and up and over into the boat. I was able to get him back out of the boat with a fishing pole but it had me standing at the very front edge of my boat and ready to let him have the boat to himself. They are pretty bad about sunning themselves on tree branches hanging over the water and its just second nature to look before you proceed near,under or into branches around here. The problem is that most people agree that snakes are not too dangerous unless provoked but I find a cottonmouth to be "Provoked" way to easily and way too aggresive at times but unless its around my house or in a swimming area or something Im still not gonna kill it unless its in self defense..lol
Take care.... Sam
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JORDAN THOMPSON (Massa_jorge)
 BOC KNIGHT
Username: Massa_jorge
Post Number: 232
Registered: 2-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2005 - 7:25 pm: |
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i have seen aggressive cottonmouths, just not many. maybe 20 were aggressive out of dealing with more than a couple hundred. not near as bad as say a 7 foot black rat snake or texas rat snake. that's probably a good thing though! might help in my experience too that the bites i have treated were not my own, haha. i get bitten fairly regularly by my pet snakes, it's just a fact of keeping them. can't say i have eaten cottonmouth, but i have given several to the laotian guys who fished where i used to run lines. cottonmouths and water snakes would eat the bluegills on my lines and drown. if they were frsh, i would gut em out and give em to them. they said they cooked their entire catch together anyway. also used to shoot pigeons off the railroad trestle for them, but that's another story. matt, i looked at your pictures of boots, belt and wallet, as well as your turtles. really got a kick out of the names, man! when i bring my snakes out of cooling i will post some good pics in the pet pics section. i just found out we had picture sections, and i have been on here a year. shows how big the BOC is! check out my hunting pics on the hunting photos thread. i will definitely have a photo album in every category, here shortly!
yall take care!
-jordan |
mark johnson (Mark_j)
 BOC ROYALTY
Username: Mark_j
Post Number: 1886
Registered: 9-2003
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2005 - 7:53 pm: |
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sam, i've bass fished in about every canal around lake mattamuskeet and learned the first trip to carry plenty of spinnerbaits because when you hang up in a tree you dont go after it unless you want a boat full of those things.
the lake is a federal preserve and the snakes are huge.
on our honeymoon me and the wife put a 14 foot skiff in the rose bay canal and at points the canal narrows to the point of bouncing the boat off the sides of the canal at 20 mph.
she freaked when she looked behind the boat at one of these choke points. as the boat motored through the cottonmouths and mocassins would roll off the banks into the canal.
last summer on the cape fear before dark we witnessed a scuffle and limbs moving in a tree about 30 feet up. a few seconds later a squirrel and snake fell to the water. never saw either one of them again and didnt get a good look at the snake to see what kind it was.
If it aint a Stelling it aint loud enough.
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Mark Goldsmith (Yellowcat)
BOC ROYALTY
Username: Yellowcat
Post Number: 1636
Registered: 2-2003
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, February 25, 2005 - 4:53 pm: |
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Jordan, great pics and I love the coachwhip, beautiful snake. Sorry about the rough response I thought you were one of the good ole boys like around here where they kill 20 or 30 rattlers a year. I really enjoy keeping hots and if people continue to kill rattlers around here, at the current rate they will all be gone soon. Luckily there are still some extremely remote areas left in NC where snakes can live and breed uninterrupted. I used to kill every poisonous snake I saw, but after keeping one I realized how amazing they are and how fragile the populations of poisonous snakes are. I would love to see more pics when you have some. I'll take some also.
Mark Goldsmith, Hotsprings,N.C.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
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JORDAN THOMPSON (Massa_jorge)
BOC KNIGHT
Username: Massa_jorge
Post Number: 253
Registered: 2-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, February 26, 2005 - 1:20 am: |
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no problem, mark, we all seem to make short posts and then wonder why we get a harsh response. don't worry about it. i saw from one of your posts and also your profile that you are in an area that probably couldn't sustain any harvesting at all, even for a couple rattlers as pets, without severely hurting the population. yes the timber rattlers are slow to reach breeding age, that coupled with habitat loss is a major factor in their decline. however, prairie and western diamondback rattlesnake numbers across texas are strong, and actually on the increase. we do have our sensitive species, like the blacktail and rock rattlesnakes, that are like your timbers in that they can't breed for almost ten years. i would never fill a belt order with one of those. but a diamondback or prairie fits the bill fine, and they can both breed at two years of age. i figure on average i catch up to 20 rattlers a year and kill three or four. i roll the skins and freeze them. in the last four years i have retained six skins in the freezer and one head. i tanned one of the skins as a teaching aid for my classes, because the scouts and church groups i have talked to don't want any hot snakes there, understandably. what is the coolest hot snake yall have kept? mine had to be the copperheads from central texas and arkansas. they are very smart and actually pretty personable. the wife and i have agreed that i won't keep any hots till the kids are grown up and gone, haha.
-jordan |
Mark Goldsmith (Yellowcat)
BOC ROYALTY
Username: Yellowcat
Post Number: 1638
Registered: 2-2003
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, February 26, 2005 - 11:13 am: |
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Same here on the hots. I would never put my kids in harms way just to pursue a hobby. I have kept hots but I always had them in my tool shed locked up tight. It's easier to heat and cool a smaller room anyway, and I sleep easier at night. I know a lot of reptile lovers like to handle hots and get them accustomed to handling but I just like to watch them. The handling that is necessary for cleaning cages and feeding is enough for me. I'm not willing to lose a limb or my life.
The copperheads are really neat snakes. The first one I kept was a nasty little guy that jumped at everything that moved. I released it after feeding it a couple mice which was no problem at all since he wanted to bite everything. The second was rescued from my good buddy Scotty who was determined to kill the snake after stepping out of the truck to relieve himself and discovered the snake laying right in front of him where he was aiming. Needless to say he didn't finish the job until I had the snake contained. This snake was the most layed back copperhead I've ever seen. I could swap cages for cleaning and it would just lay on the hook and never move until it was safely in the other cage. It never struck at anything except a meal. the coolest copperhead I've ever kept was a big 38" dark colored snake that again was saved from my fishing buddies. This snake was lying in between the railroad tracks and was practically stepped on by my good buddy Bryan because it was a moon light night and we decided to walk the tracks with the lanterns off. There were about five of us fishing that night and the crowd was yelling kill it kill it as I was trying to catch this snake by moonlight, not the ideal situation for concentration. Although I had always wanted a truly large copper this one wouldn't eat and had to be released. Was either to old to learn new ways or gravid.
Mark Goldsmith, Hotsprings,N.C.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
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JORDAN THOMPSON (Massa_jorge)
BOC KNIGHT
Username: Massa_jorge
Post Number: 274
Registered: 2-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, February 26, 2005 - 8:16 pm: |
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if i ever get into your neck of the woods mark, we are going to have to catch some snakes as well as catfish. same goes if you come out this way. right now i am looking for maybe a sheet of plexiglass to put near a wild rattler so i can get real close picture of it safely. the defensive posturing pictures i posted of the others, it doesn't matter if i get tagged, but with a rattler it is a different story. when you get em to stand their ground, they have a way of getting closer while you have em in the viewfinder!
i have seen a lot of folks that handle hots, but i won't risk it. i am at enough risk just doing what i do. i have free handled a black necked spitting cobra that had its venom glands surgically removed. it still had fangs though. that thing felt like velvet- and it was totally cool the whole time i handled it. i have a midland water snake i 'rescued' from some kids last week i wanted to get a picture of, but it looks like $^it. might not live, which sucks.
midland watersnakes are a subspecies of the northern water snake. they have an anticoagulant in their saliva that looks pretty crazy when they bite you, hahaha. i will get bit by one and take a picture of it, so yall can see the effects!
later,
-jordan |
ronnie joe leblanc jr. (Ronnie_joe)
BOC INITIATE
Username: Ronnie_joe
Post Number: 14
Registered: 3-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 31, 2005 - 8:00 pm: |
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i aint no snake person. i dont like to see em by accident much less hunt thim.. yall becarefull with thim snakes.... |
Thomas Mance Jay (Thomasjay)
BOC INITIATE
Username: Thomasjay
Post Number: 2
Registered: 4-2009
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 1:44 pm: |
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I'm a snake person. I've got 2 ball pythons, they're awesome pets, wouldn't hurt a fly. |
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