texasbb
Trail Wise!
Hates chicken
Posts: 1,223 
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Post by texasbb on Oct 15, 2015 21:22:38 GMT -8
I have to admit I'd be inclined to sneak over and take a peek at such a pit, but it would be a quick one! Those things were all over the place. I don't know where that was shot, but it looks disturbingly like my eastern WA stomping grounds. Our chillin' Western Rattlers aren't generally aggressive, but those things looked they'd had too much coffee. |
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rebeccad
Trail Wise!
Writing like a maniac
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Post by rebeccad on Oct 16, 2015 8:47:08 GMT -8
those things looked they'd had too much coffee. That is the most terrifying thought I've seen all day! Rattlers on triple-espressos...I'm going back to bed and staying there. Or going to Ireland. They don't have snakes in Ireland... |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2015 9:04:01 GMT -8
I think it is difficult to separate the spectacle from the spectators here. How active were the snakes before the intruders began poking a camera on a stick into their "den," if that is what it was? We really can't see because the moment we first see the snakes it is from the "eyes" of an intruder's stick. And at that point the snakes had reason to be agitated.
I think it was the summer between my senior year of high school and first year of college that my brother and I began pitching a tent among some weeds in the vicinity of a prairie-rattler den. We did not get the stakes in the ground before we discovered our error. Let's just say that it took a lot longer to take down the tent than it did to put it up. We were pretty darn jumpy by that time and inclined to sneak in, pull a stake, and high-tail it out of there — one step at a time.
Since then I have not had much incentive to poke around snake dens, but I don't view rattlers the same either. Left alone, I think they would gladly leave us alone. They gain nothing from wasting their venom on peaceable humans.
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echo
Trail Wise!
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Post by echo on Nov 3, 2015 19:42:15 GMT -8
I remember when one of my grandpa's friends stopped by the house. He ran in, telling this story of being out in the grasslands outside Meeteetse and sitting down on a rock, and waking up surrounded by rattlers. He kept talking about how it had been a whole pit full and my Dad and grandpa were telling him he exaggerated and he swore he'd blasted a bunch with his shotgun to get out. They teased him until he took them out and the back of his pick up was filled with dead snakes.
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Post by tallgrass on Nov 5, 2015 20:33:11 GMT -8
I would LOVE to come across something like that. When I worked in the Loess Hills of Iowa, we knew of several rattler hibernaculums. I would check them daily in the spring waiting for the rattlers to start moving out.
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