Yikes! Were you wearing tall boots? That's about the limit of my snake skill, wear tall boots and avoid them. Up here in the sticks they say we used to have until they were eradicated about 1900.
Edit - fixed snake picture link
Just Red Wing Irish Setters. Not that tall. In the summer here when I was able to, I’d wear tall snake proof boots when metal detecting for nuggets since you’re kinda preoccupied with the search coil.
That Timber Rattler looks like it can hide way too well. Ugh. Are they eradicated just in your area? Could swear we had them in Virginia though I never saw one.
Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus)
Maine is currently one of the only states in the lower 48 that is not home to rattlesnakes, though it wasn’t always this way. The impressive Timber Rattlesnake used to be found in the rugged mountains of Western Maine, though likely always in very low numbers. Timber Rattlesnakes are venomous predators of small mammals such as shrews, mice, rats, squirrels, and rabbits, though their powerful bites can kill humans. Rattlesnakes were extirpated from Maine probably before the turn of the 20th century.
https://maineaudubon.org/news/5-creatures-you-may-not-know-used-to-live-in-maine/
Interesting. Thanks. Wonder if the shorter season for them had something to do with their low numbers to begin with
I’ve no fondness for snakes. Visiting relatives in VA one summer when I was about 12 we went to a swimming hole on the Goshen River. This kid about my age started screaming like crazy out in the slow moving water. He got into a nest of Water Moccasins. Didn’t make it. Nobody dared try to save him. That fuk’d my head up for snakes. You can imagine my terror when I came across that nest of rattlers.
They must have them further south. In fact there may be a few left here but no one has encountered them in over a century. They exist somewhere to get the color picture. I grabbed the picture from the Maine Audubon website.
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