Snakes & Tarantulas
My brother-in-law said when he driving home last night he saw a snake in the road. I asked him why he didn’t catch it. Some snakes are valuable. Some are more valuable than others, but you really have to catch them first, so that you can ID them, otherwise they are gone.
A couple of weeks ago, as I was getting ready to leave the house, I heard a screeching sound and turned around to see a snake with a frog in it’s mouth headed for the bushes. I always have a camera ready but not ready enough. By the time I got it out and turned on, the snake had disappeared into the bushes with his lunch.
Okay, I’ll buy snakes.  You catch them, I’ll buy them. Depending on the type of snake, it’s length, width and weight, I’ll by your snakes. If you have caught a wild snake and wish to sell him, post a comment on this blog and provide email address so that I can contact you and get photos and other details about the snake.
We have water moccasins where I come from, in Northern Florida, sometimes called Cottenmouth Moccasins. They are very agrressive snakes. For instance a Diamond Back Rattle Snake will flee from you, and only if you corner it with no place for it to hide will it turn aggressive. Moccasins, on the other hand, turn aggressive even when they are not cornered. They are more territorial.
I remember one day, in my 20′s I was scoping out my family farm in North Florida, looking for deer trails and where they intersected to find premium place to put a tree stand.  At one point, where two trails crossed I paused to get my bearings and think about what way the deer were travelling. I happened to look down and there was a coiled Moccasin just 3 or four inches from my left foot. He had a head on him about 3 inches wide and while he appreared to be asleep, a sudden adrenaline rush came over me and instead of fleeing I jumped straight up into the air, with no trajectory in mind. I just jumped straight up in the air.
In situations like this time slows to a crawl and the mind goes into super-fast mode. If I wrote down all my thoughts during that instance from when I jumped into the air and landed it would take 10 minutes to write down all the thoughts that raced through my mind. Your brain is running 1000 mph, and I thought how stupid I was to jump straight up into the air, when I would only land right next to the snake, startle him, and then he would bite me, so I thought the only solution was to come down on the snake with one shoe landing squarely on the snake’s head, and I was able to pull this off. When I landed on his head his body began to thrash about and then he coiled around my leg. I calmly pulled out my pocket knife and slid it along the edge of my shoe, severing his head from his body. This was over about 25 years ago, in 1983 or so.
Still I wouldn’t mind having a couple of snakes.
When I was in college one of my girlfriends gave me a tarantula, a large hairy spider, bigger than my hand. To feed him I would simply buy little whilte mice and put them in the cage with him and just feed the mice. Once a week or so I would notice a dead mouse, and then the following day, there would be nothing left of the mouse but a little round ball of fur. The tarnatula injects a venom into the mouse that disolves all of the mouses innards, including his bones, then comes back to the mouse, fangs into him and sucks out all the goo, leaving only a skin of fur. We didn’t have webcams that could monitor that stuff back then, but now I do. It would be interesting to set up a cam and record the snake’s or the spider’s actions of a long period of time, record it all to the hard drive, then later go through the video and just chop out the action sequences. It would make for some cool blog posts.