Invasive Species

[Ninurta]

Snakes are cool. I love the snakes around here. Garter, brown, ring-necked (so little and cute), hog nose, and the mighty blue racer, along with a few others. You have water snakes down by the river. I don't like those; they are aggressive and bite. Nothing poisonous like rattlers, those are scarce here, near extinct.

The blue racers are aggressive and will bite, but I love teasing them until they give in and become tame enough to hold. There was one racer that I wouldn't catch. I was over by the junk pile where I had covered some things with a 10' x 10' tarp, and this racer came over the top and was as long or longer than the tarp. I was about to snatch it by the head when I thought, "No, this one is too big".

Many of the snakes here can be held, but most of them poop on you when they get scared and try to flee.

I think what you are calling "blue racers" are what we used to call "black racers" - a long thin shiny black snake that runs like the wind. The biggest one I ever saw was in Ohio. My ma, who stands 5 foot 2, picked it up with a stick in it's middle and held it over her head, and both it's head and tail touched the ground, so it was between 10 and 12 feet long. I has one in the yard here last fall that was about 6 feet long. The cat was watching it out of curiosity, and when I saw it poke it's  head up above the grass to look around as they will do, I went to get a closer look - but of course as I approached it,it took off like a shot back into the woods. You could here it thrashing in the leaves way into the woods as it made a rapid getaway.

I've heard the old timers say that racers will kill copperheads, but I've never seen it done myself. They said the racer and the copperhead would intertwine, and if the copperhead bit the racer, the racer would take off, find a certain herb in the woods, take a bite, and return to the copperhead and renew the battle until the copperhead was dead.

I do know that they will occasionally flatten their necks like a cobra, but don't know why they do it. They aren't poisonous, but will bite if provoked. Dad used to go along and catch them by the tail when he was a kid, crack them like a whip, and their heads would skitter off their bodies. He tried doing that to one once, but got tangled up in brush and couldn't "whip" it, whereupon it whipped him - turned back on him and bit him. He said it didn't hurt much, felt about like a brier scratch, but it scared him so bad that for the rest of his life, he would not suffer a snake to live if he saw it. That incident, and one when a copperhead struck him, but missed the bite, turned him into a life-long enemy to all things snake-like.

There are copperheads around here, but not as many as folks would have you believe. To some of these folks, many of them, any old brown colored snake is reported as a "copperhead", when most aren't. We have brown water snakes that everyone here thinks are copperheads, but they aren't. They're just brown snakes. A true copperhead has a thick body for it's length, a particular saddle pattern to it's skin, and a diamond shaped head that is shiny yellowish,or copper colored but shiny, hence the name "copperhead". I've only seen a handful of them over time. Copperheads, rattle snakes, and water moccasins are snakes I'll kill without remorse, but most snakes I let go on their way to do their thing. Helps keep the rodents down.

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