Old post, I know. When I was 4 years old, my fathers job at Alcoa Aluminum in Edgewater NJ was closing and moving to PA. So he had a choice, to move from our home in North Jersey to PA or seek a job in another company. Through a stroke of luck, a house was for sale across the street from my Mothers parents in South Jersey, about 20 miles from Atlantic City.
We would travel every weekend to do the necessary repairs on the house and get it ready to move in to when our house in the North end of the state was sold.
It was late spring and the days were warm and the nights quite cool. The previous weekend we had removed the shingles from one section of the house and now we were gathering them up to burn them (back when you were allowed to do such things, in the late fifties.
About 4 layers of shingles from the top I found this tiny dark brown or dark olive drab snake, all of 3 or 4 inches long. I asked my mom if I could have it as a pet, and being a city kid, was thrilled that I had my own snake.
The snake had his own terrarium in a large fish tank with a screen cover. I'd feed him meal worms or crickets each day, change his water and clean his cage. He let me pick him up and he'd slither up my arm or rest very contently on my hand. This went on for about 3 months, during which time he almost doubled in size.
I came home from school that day and when I went to feed my snake he coiled up when he saw me. When I put my finger on the glass of the tank and he put his tail up and shook it. I knew something was wrong, so I went back to my bedroom and looked in my snake book. It seems that my little pet was a now not so young Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake. If I looked very closely I could see the beginning of the diamond pattern appearing on his scales.
For now, I changed his water with a turkey baster and dropped the food in the tank. The following weekend I brought him back to South Jersey and released him near a large lake in the woods. I couldn't see killing him, as I made the mistake of not researching him when I first brought him home.
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