Snake Rescue
If I didn’t use netting, the mocking birds, jays and cardinals would rob us of a significant portion of our fig, blackberry and tomato harvest. Also, as it turns out, the little brown thrush would hop happily into my plumeria nursery and tear up all the seedlings.
But I wish I didn’t have to use bird netting, and here’s one reason why:
I came around the giant fig tree in the middle of our back yard to check on that plumeria nursery this morning, to see whether the seedlings needed water. Bosco the Spotty Dog, who has taken a shot to the neck before in a confrontation with a copperhead, pushed ahead of me to a little fence surrounding the nursery area, and started biting at something on the ground.
I could see it was a snake of some sort, and pulled him away. It looked like the snake was stuck in the bird netting, so I put the dog in the house and armed myself with a hoe and a pair of scissors.
Turns out it was a blotched water snake, one of three or four snake species around here that appear similar to the cottonmouth, and even mimic their venomous brethren’s belligerent behavior.
This was the fourth time over the past couple of years in which a big water snake has come up from the river, apparently hunting for something it finds tasty, and tangled itself up badly in my bird netting. The other three times involved diamondback water snakes, and two out of those three times the aggressiveness of the snakes coupled with the hopelessness of their predicament forced me to kill them.
I really hate doing that, because these big snakes eat mice and rats wherever they can find them (along with toads and frogs and a few insects), and play a role in keeping the vermin in balance.
Today’s snake, thankfully, was comparatively docile, probably because it had been tangled up for a long time. Long enough that fire ants were trying to eat its tail. I brushed these off, and was able to insert the scissors between the serpent’s body and the netting cells. These snakes seem to have no sense of proportion. If they can fit their heads through the net, they assume that their sometimes-much-wider bodies will fit just as easily.
It doesn’t work that way.
After cutting it loose, the snake was so tired that it crawled off slowly into the fig trunks, giving me enough time to snap a picture, and even allowing me to pull it back into the grass for a better exposure. Ordinarily, these water snakes will attack if you mess with them. And while they aren’t poisonous, they bite hard.
So it ended well today, and I’m batting .500 in the snake rescue department.
Also, Bosco will get a little something extra in the dog bowl today. If the water snake would’ve been an unfettered copperhead, cottonmouth or coral snake, he would have taken the bite in my place.
That’s just the kind of dog he is.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 13, 2008, 11 18 pm
Now, I don’t mind you including the river as an intimate part of your blog, even posting on snake tolerance is okay, because I agree 100% (except sometimes I put the copperheads and rattlers over the fence in my neighbor’s yard) – but, dude. You have a dog name of Bosco, too? That is way strange.
jd
— jdallen Aug 13, 06:46 pm #
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Yeah I guess.
Could’ve called him Hadacall, ‘cause we hadacall him something.
When I was a kid (OK, maybe I’m kinda old) there was this chocolate powder that tasted great in milk. Mmmmm. Bosco.
That’s all I’ve got.
Hey, wait. You aren’t saying you’re dog’s named Bosco, too?
— Bob Aug 13, 09:07 pm #
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