Snake Season Is Around The Corner.

[BilletHead]

This is a rather large copperhead from about 25 years ago. A friend and I were bowhunting squirrels in the fall. A cool morniing and I had missed this in the middle of the trail we were walking on. My friend Rolla screamed and said I had just missed steping on the snake. Needless to say it then recieved a couple of flu-flu arrrow metal blunts to the head. 38 and 3/4 inches long. I don't kill snakes any more, I even stop and help them off the road now. I would much rather have a snake then a mouse or rat around.

[dgames]

So, it sounds like cottonmouths aren't common on the NFOW. In reading various things over the years, two places in MO seem to keep popping up at being infested with cottonmouths - crane creek and the upper jacks fork. Are the stories of cottonmouths on those streams overblown? If not, are there other streams much higher than normal concentrations of cottonmouths? I wonder why they would be thick on the JF, but not the current, NFOW, 11pt, big piney which are all in the same general vicinity?

I have spent a fair amount of time in the woods over the years and I have only seen one copperhead in the wild in my life and it was in the middle of the fairway on a golf course in Tulsa.

[ozark trout fisher]

Snakes get their bad reputation from the Bible. "Good, God fearing" Christians I've known kill every snake they see, and the irrational fear most have of snakes is due to this story of the devil possesing a snake and God cursing the species because of it.

Well maybe...I don't think for me it has anything to do with the Bible either way. I just have difficulty with things that can crawl right up to me and bite me without even knowing it's there before-hand. That said I've never killed a snake. As I said, I actually like them, but they I can't help that they also freak me out.

[Outside Bend]

In reading various things over the years, two places in MO seem to keep popping up at being infested with cottonmouths - crane creek and the upper jacks fork.

I dunno about "infested." In the past ten years I've seen maybe four cottonmouths, split between the Jacks Fork and the James. Given the thousands of folks out using our rivers each season, and the relatively few snakebites which have occurred, I'd say it's a little overblown.

Judging by the trespass thread, snakes aren't nearly as dangerous as the other PEOPLE out on the stream

[Feathers and Fins]

There is a major factor over-looked by people. Snakes in heavily traveled areas. For the most part areas with high human numbers have low snake numbers. Two factors cause this. Road kills and People killing them.

One of the best places to collect snakes was off highway 60 from Vero Beach Florida to the Turnpike in Yee Haw Junctions. But when more and more people moved to the area and the popularity of Stck Marsh and Farm Pond13 The population declined. I use to go out and collect well over 100 snakes a night on or near 60. I talked to a friend awhile back and he told me you are lucky to collect 10 a night now.

Im not suprised that popular creeks and streams around here would not have near the populations they could have.

[jdmidwest]

Otters are doing a fair job of keeping the numbers low. Lately, I have noticed far fewer watersnakes than ever before. And I see more otter sign.

[BilletHead]

There are more cottonmouths out there than you all might think. I wasn't looking for them either. Maybe Pat and I are snake magnets. Clear creek in Vernon County, Flat creek in Barry County,Weaubleau Creek in St Clair County and Sac River just upstream of the 82 boat ramp also in St Clair County. Every fall on the Sac they gather on the sunny side of the bluffs getting ready to winter. There they lay in groups in the sun. All the nooks and crannys in the bluffs make nice places to den. They have been there every Fall for the past several years. They do for a fact ride high in the water swimming with there head up. The above Copperhead I posted the photo came from Vernon County. I know places they den near Clear Creek.

Marty

[Feathers and Fins]

Jd funny you bring up otters i was just talking to my taxidermist awhile back about this and he said the same thing. I made a goal for next year to catch enough otter to make a comforter for my bed. No creature I have ever seen has more hair per square inch IMO than an otter and it would make a fabulous comforter.

[Al Agnew]

The reason I say the Jacks Fork has a lot of them is because, in all the years I've been messing around on Ozark streams, the Jacks Fork is the only stream where I see cottonmouths every time I go, and usually several per day. On all the other streams I've seen them, I've only seen one or two in a day, and only once in a great while.

In some areas they tend to hang around springs. On Wappapello Lake, there is a fair-sized spring that comes out in a wider area of a narrow, tree-lined side channel off the main lake. We used to almost always see cottonmouths in that wider area where the spring came out, but other than there, we very seldom saw one on the lake.

Mingo Swamp Wildlife Refuge is one of the best places to see cottonmouths in Missouri. There is a gravel road along the margin of the lowlands with a rocky hillside on the other side of the road, and in the spring and fall you'll see lots of cottonmouths moving across the road to denning areas in the rocks.

[dgames]

One of the only places where I have for sure seen a cottonmouth is on the black fork of the poteau river in OK. It is in the Oachita Mtns in SE OK and flows into lake wister. Floated is in 09 with a friend from high school that lives near there. He showed me a link to a guy that does incredible wildlife photography on that river. Here is a link to the gallery,

http://www.pbase.com/rbr_ccr

check out the "cottonmouths", the "other snakes" and the "other critters along the creek" galleries. Pretty amazing pics. The black fork is a pretty cool stream. Kind of like an ozark stream except it has less gravelly areas and more large drops.