Jun 27
Snaaaake!
So, my grandma leaves the house to go pick up some liverwurst for lunch (yum) and comes running back in the house — quite literally looking like she’s about the have a heart attack. “Snake!” she gasps out. So anyway, I go look out the front door and sure enough, there he sits, chilling out by my tires. So I call my darling husband and ask him wtf to do about it (I can’t tell if it’s a rattlesnake or something else) and, regardless, my grandmother won’t leave the house until it’s gone. I want liverwurst, the snake must go.
My darling husband, being so concerned for my health and safety.. tells me to get a broom. WTF? I’m not Steve Irwin — I’m not going to go wrap a rattlesnake around a broom while yelling “Crikey”, stick it 5″ from my kid’s face and then kiss it a few times before I relocate him to a new habitat where he can play with the other little poisonous beasties.
So I call my dad. He tells me to call the fire department. This feels retarded to me.. calling the fire department to come rescue us little girls from a snake, but I do it. The woman on the phone tells me to keep an eye on the snake from a distance so that the firemen can snag it when they get there. The snake, of course, does not want to cooperate and makes me chase him all around the driveway, through the side yard and into the back yard.
Where he proceeds to DEFILE my Bowflex. Finally he settles in a nice little nook by the hot tub. At this point, Katie’s boyfriend Trey tells her to walk up beside the snake slowly and chop it’s head off with a shovel. She doesn’t want to kill it, so he tells her to grab it by the neck. You can really tell, ladies and gentlemen, who truly loves you. Notice that our significant others want us to go snake wrangling. Our father wants us to call the fire department and stay the hell away from the possibly poisonous and ridiculously fast creature.
Finally some big burly men (three of them, to be precise) from the fire department show up to rescue us from our scaly friend. They, of course, start laughing at us (perched up on the hot tub, out of reach of the snake) because it is a bull snake and not a rattlesnake at all. They grab him up with some snakey-tong things and at least inform us that it is one of the largest bull snakes that they have ever seen. They throw it over the fence for us x.x Had I known that all they were going to do was pick it up and toss it five feet over the fence (through which it can easily just slither back into the yard..) I wouldn’t have called in the first place. I suppose if it had been a rattlesnake, they would have actually taken it away to the poison control center.
Ah well, there’s my excitement for the day!
As a PS here, for those of you making fun of me for thinking it might have been a rattlesnake, this is taken from wikipedia:
Bullsnakes are often confused for rattlesnakes, and killed by laypersons. Due to its coloration, dorsal pattern, and semi-keeled scalation; the Bullsnake superficially resembles the Western Diamondback Rattler ( Crotalus atrox ), which is also common within the same range. The Bullsnake capitalizes on this similarity by performing a very impressive rattlesnake impression when threatened. First, it hisses, or forcibly exhales through a bisected glottis, which flaps back and forth producing a very convincing “rattle” sound. It will also take on a rattlesnake-like “S-curve” body posture, as if it is going to strike. The Bullsnake will commonly vibrate its tail rapidly amongst the brush or leaves, and flatten its head to make it take on a more characteristic triangular-shaped head of the rattlesnake. These defensive behaviors are meant to scare away threats, not sound an attack. Their rattlesnake mimic is so impressive that it is frequently the Bullsnake’s very undoing when discovered by humans.
Blogging - the bored, Warhammer playing housewife way!
One of these things is not like the other… =P
Excuse me. I repeat:
Bullsnakes are often confused for rattlesnakes, and killed by laypersons. Due to its coloration, dorsal pattern, and semi-keeled scalation; the Bullsnake superficially resembles the Western Diamondback Rattler ( Crotalus atrox ), which is also common within the same range. The Bullsnake capitalizes on this similarity by performing a very impressive rattlesnake impression when threatened. First, it hisses, or forcibly exhales through a bisected glottis, which flaps back and forth producing a very convincing “rattle†sound. It will also take on a rattlesnake-like “S-curve†body posture, as if it is going to strike. The Bullsnake will commonly vibrate its tail rapidly amongst the brush or leaves, and flatten its head to make it take on a more characteristic triangular-shaped head of the rattlesnake. These defensive behaviors are meant to scare away threats, not sound an attack. Their rattlesnake mimic is so impressive that it is frequently the Bullsnake’s very undoing when discovered by humans.
And in any case, it’s not like I was looking at it nice and closeup. I was chasing it around the yard from as far away as I could possibly be while my grandmother and sister were squealing in my ears (and likely contributing to the reason WHY the snake wouldn’t just settle down somewhere to wait for the fire department).
I dunno. The coloration doesn’t look all that different to me, and even if rattlesnakes have a strike distance of ~2 feet (if the average snake is 3ft long, and I’m not sure on that), I’m not sure how close I’d want to get to it either.
A shovel probably would have done the trick, yes.
You’d think that your sister wouldn’t have been squealing, or she’d be poorly prepared for a job in emergency services (where she’ll, more than likely, actually have to deal with things like this).
Doesn’t Scottsdale have Animal Control?
As an aside, glad to see your blog is working again! I had to wait like four hours to post a comment, and if not for Google Reader, I’d not even have known what the post said.
I’m glad my blog is working again, too. Dan was upgrading it for me to the new version of wordpress and it went absolutely insane. I have no idea what the problem was, only that he spent hours fixing it and slamming things around and insisting that he wasn’t angry :p (he’s so cute).
I have no idea about Scottsdale Animal Control. When I called the fire department they seemed to take it as a matter of course that I would contact them about a snake and the firemen who showed up didn’t seem peeved at all. One of them mentioned that it was actually their third snake pickup for the day.
The snake, btw, was about five feet at a guess. When he was slithering from the Treadclimber to the Bowflex he was touching both at the same time and was, of course, not fully extended since he was in slither mode. I haven’t measured this space, but I’d just about stake my life that it’s around five feet.
Just to be clear, Katie wasn’t squealing as much as my grandma. I admit to a little bit of hyperbole there. My grandma was squealing, however. Katie clearly didn’t want to get anywhere near it (even as close as I got — perhaps 10 feet or so for me, maybe 4ish feet once I sat on the hot tub), but she wasn’t EEEEEEEEKIIIIIING in my ear. I highly doubt, however, that she would have been able to bring herself to remove it. In her defense, once we cornered it outside she didn’t really think it was a rattler. I couldn’t see it’s butt at that point, since it was curled up under a rock, but.. I suppose she noticed that it’s head wasn’t flat. Who knows?
Had I known that it wasn’t poisonous… eh.. I still don’t think I’d have removed it ^^ F being a firefighter, I suppose.