Tuesday, September 20, 2005
SNAKES ALIVE! CARRY A FLASHLIGHT!
De Lawd invented flashlights for one reason – to see snakes after dark.
Carry a light until cold weather, when snakes will den up for winter.
I’ve got a five-foot blacksnake living in the creative clutter underneath my back porch. He’s welcome to stay there. No harm will befall him. That’s because he keeps field mice and chipmunks from moving in, eating my bird seed and pooping all over the place.
But when it comes to rattlesnakes and copperheads – the only two poisonous snakes in the Blue Ridge Mountains – the paradigm shifts.
Here’s what’s happening.
As days and nights turn cooler, snakes seek out protected places – woodpiles, underneath porches, beneath large rocks or flagstones, under pieces of tin or other debris, among the stones in rock walls.
Snakes are diurnal, but are mostly night prowlers. You haven’t seen any at night? It’s the ones you don’t see that can ruin your day, your week, your month.
That’s why you should carry a flashlight every time you step outdoors until several hard freezes send snakes into hibernation.
A ranger friend in Shenandoah National Park left the upstairs of her house one autumn evening. She was carrying a basket of clothes to the basement to wash. She stepped on a copperhead. Barefooted.
By the time she got untangled from the clothesbasket and the snake, it had nailed her twice. The pain was excruciating, she said. Swelling and tissue damage started almost immediately.
Two years after the incident, she was still limping and wearing one of her regulation ranger boots untied. The swelling may never go down.
My doctor lives outside Charlottesville, Va. One evening, as he collected armloads of yard debris, he inadvertently collected a copperhead among the sticks. The copperhead promptly hit him in the hand. Nerve damage was so severe that his fingers will probably never regain their original dexterity.
"Good thing I’m not a surgeon," he said. "I’d have to find another line of work."
Snakes can show up in unusual places.
My brother-in-law, Kai, went to his woodpile one cool evening to get some seasoned oak. He lifted a log – and a copperhead stared back at him. Kai dispatched the snake, now two rows deep, with a load of .22-caliber rat shot, but credited his personal Woodpile Rule No. 1 with saving him grief.
"Any time I move wood," he said, "and the temperature is above freezing, I never put my hand in places where I can’t see."
Kai also found a copperhead once in the motor compartment of his hot tub. I suppose it’s warm and cozy in there.
Here in the mountains, I never go out in the evening without sweeping a light ahead of me. In fact, it may look weird but I have my own hot-tub defense. Since I have no close neighbors, I always get in the hot tub nekid – but with a pistol strapped to my side and a miner’s lamp on my head.
Haven’t been bitten yet, so stop snickering.
Let’s each of us, in our own way, be careful out there this fall.
END
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Gary, I share the same philosophy on snakes. Black snakes good, cat-eye snakes bad. My wife however, wants me to kill every snake on the property. No amount of reasoning will dissaude her from her fear. I've just accepted it and don't tell her about any black snakes on the property.
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