I’ve always been good with snakes but not copperheads. They’re not very big and they’re well camouflaged in leaf litter so they’re not easily seen and they can be anywhere here. At least with cotton mouths, you know they aren’t going to be up a ridge somewhere hunkered down under a log. Thankfully we haven’t had a population increase so our danger level is pretty low.
A few years ago a business associate/friend visited from Los Angeles, CA and wanted to do some deer hunting and clay shooting. He had handguns he could shoot at a range and long guns he had nowhere to shoot. He was amazed we could just walk out the front door and shoot or hunt so we agreed he’d visit for a few days next time business brought him nearby and see life outside of the concrete jungle.
For some reason, he researched all the deadly animals and bugs here as part of his prep. This ain’t the Australian Outback; the list here is pretty short. He was so terrified of copperheads, cotton mouths, and black widows he demanded instruction on how to deal with them if he ran across one of them. Not like we’re eat up with them so I sort of seriously told him he wouldn’t see any around the house and if he was in the woods he’d have a gun so just shoot it if he saw one and it was bothering him. He says, “So if I see a black widow, shoot it?” In an effort to end the topic and knowing I hadn’t seen a black widow here in probably three years, I said, “Well that should take care of it.” I assumed any reasonable person seeing one would know a well placed shoe is a more appropriate weapon.
Next morning we’re planning to deer hunt from a two man elevated box blind. We walk down before dawn. I climb up first, unlock the door, and take a seat. He comes in and as he’s swinging his light around sees a small black spider in the corner. He freezes with his light on it and asks, “Is that a black widow?” It was so I said, “Yep” as I smacked it into the next world with the back of my hand. He didn’t see all that because as soon as he heard “Yep” he lost his cookies, dropped his light, and was flailing around with his gun in way too small a space to get it aimed at anything inside the blind. I grabbed the barrel of his .300 Win Mag to make sure it never pointed at me or him and yelled at him to stop, it was dead. He stopped. Asked him what the heck he was doing and he says he was going to shoot it before it killed us both. I thought he was crazy for trying to shoot a tiny spider 2’ away in a box blind with a .300 Win Mag that’s well over 2’ long. He thought I was crazy for flippantly killing a black widow by backhanding it with my bare hand. We still talk on the phone once in a while but he hasn’t been back.
Poisonous snakes and poisonous other stuff: it’s the ones you don’t see that are a problem.
