Monday, August 5, 2019

I Don't Like Spiders and Snakes

But I do like snake skins. When Justin was in Texas, he encountered lots of snakes, including rattlesnakes, water snakes, coachwhips, and huge indigo snakes like the one pictured here.


He taught himself how to tan snake skins, and I've written before about blocking one of the rattlesnake skins.

It turns out that New York isn't a lot different from Texas in terms of snakes. They also have plenty of rattlesnakes and have to be on the lookout for them every day. The timber rattlesnakes are on the threatened list in the state, so they can't be harmed, and they are just supposed to be moved out of the way with snake tongs. Funnily enough, it's not harm befalling the rattlesnakes that I worry about!

Justin was on the tractor in NY the other day and spied a copperhead, but they are not threatened. Now it's on my dining room wall, blocked and pinned.



I might even call it pretty, considering that it's a snake!

18 comments:

  1. I am from the Catskill-Hudson Valley region of NY and have a healthy fear of copperheads, in fact, I had to look at your picture of the snake skin out of the corner of my eye!

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    1. I understand! At least this one is dead on the wall and can't harm anyone!

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  2. I think I just don't like snakes at all!

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  3. I grew up close to a drainage ditch, and we had water moccasins in our yard as well as copperheads. I am very wary of venomous snakes! What do you do with the skins? Just use for decorative purposes? Ever made a belt with any of them? I am intrigued.

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  4. That skin may be beautiful, but I do not like snakes (or spiders) at all. They terrify me. Did Justin see (and kill) the copperhead in NY where he works? Or at your place? Fletch was bitten by a copperhead in his youth! Chopping wood at his grandparents' farm in Suffolk, VA a piece of wood flew behind the pile...Fletch reached over and came up with a copperhead attached to his arm!

    Also, I have never heard of an Indigo Snake. Yuck!

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  5. I'm sorry to say that even the skin of a snake gives me the willies!

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  6. You are a better woman that I! That said...nice job!

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  7. If I were around poisonous snakes I'd be afraid, but what I run into in my garden doesn't bother me. That copperhead skin is beautiful and very cool!!

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  8. Interesting!!!!! Snake skin is just discarded so a very cool way to appreciate them

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    1. And it's so much easier for me to appreciate a dead snake skin than a live one slithering through the grass!

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  9. Hmm. I can appreciate the life of a snake I just don't want to be near any except perhaps a garden garter snake.

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  10. Oh my. Snakes are perhaps my biggest (irrational) fear. That patterning though is quite amazing! It almost looks like stitching!

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  11. Snake tongs??? Did you say . . . snake TONGS?????

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  12. egads! a snake!! I have garter snakes and milk snakes in my yard and they live free as long as Frodo doesn't find them and bark at them.

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  13. I think I would leave the indigo and king snakes to take care of the poisonous ones. :)

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