Trophy Fishing TN Forum - Caney Fork Trout Fly Fishing - Caney Fork Trout Guide
Holy Crap...Look at all these other forum sections! ~ "Gordie" => Photography => Topic started by: dbradyh on April 29, 2009, 01:44:17 PM
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My friend in TDOT sent me this image taken from a conservation easement area. Be careful out there.
(http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll36/dbradyh/IMG_0005.jpg)
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was this in middle tn?
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My friend's office is here in Nashville and I am assuming it was In Middle TN.... He mentioned that it was nearby.
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I asked because you just don't see many of those in these parts usually. I've fished/waded creeks and rivers around here all my life and have never seen one. Lots of banded water snake look alikes but no Cotton Mouths.
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I was at Walter Hill this morning doing a little wet wading -- i had a two snakes swim right by me! They probably weren't poisonous. Just little water snakes.
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I saw one in the creek behind my parents house in Donelson when I was growing up but that was a number of years ago, have never seen another, thank goodness. I hear the bite is extremely painful.
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dang, looks more like a rattler to me :o Cottonmouths have been spotted an hour west of Nashville, with the Gore warming, they're moving on up along with armadillos & a roadrunner or two(beepbeep)
Grumpy
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dang, looks more like a rattler to me :o Cottonmouths have been spotted an hour west of Nashville, with the Gore warming, they're moving on up along with armadillos & a roadrunner or two(beepbeep)
Grumpy
Don't forget the Fire Ants!!!!
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I was at Walter Hill this morning doing a little wet wading -- i had a two snakes swim right by me! They probably weren't poisonous. Just little water snakes.
Well I guess I can forget fishing at Walter Hill with Jarrod now. ;D
One thing about the venomous snakes is you'll know them when you see them. I've only seen two Rattlers, both on the remote trails in Fall Creek Falls and a Couple of Copperheads, one when I was a kid flipping rocks looking for fishing worms and another a friend found run over on the road in Gladeville. Rattlers are the gentlemen of the woods. The two I've seen were very non aggressive towards us. One of them was sunning on the trail and we had to use a stick to move him along. He just shook his tail a few times and slithered off into a rock. The Copperhead I found looking for worms was much the same. It never made an aggressive move at us at all. We were going to kill it because it was living at our fishing pond but it got away before the gun arrived.
Small or baby snakes scare me the most because you just can’t identify them easily. BD and I found a bunch of tiny banded water snakes while wading the Caney one day. They thought we were a place to get out of the water and were swimming right up to us!!
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This past Sunday, me and a buddy were floating the Buffalo in search of small jaws -- We got hung in a tree shorty after put-in so we paddled our canoe over to the tree. My partner-in-crime reached out to grab a root on the bank, but it wasn't a root. His hand got about 3 inches from the snake, which he swears was a copperhead, before it was startled and quickly slithered away. It took my buddy around 5 minutes before he could fish again.
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Since we have a snake thread started, I will share an image my friend from Texas sent...
(http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll36/dbradyh/bigrattle.jpg)
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Good Lord!
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I hope the man holding the snake is only 5' tall ... even then that's a hell of a snake ...
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I see copperheads all the time around the Harpeth. The old-timers in Franklin call the ridge near the Natchez Trace bridge "Rattlesnake Ridge". I took my nephews and my sons up there to walk across the bridge once, and they walked right over a 5' rattler. He coiled up and took a strike at me since I was the last to go by, but I dodged him and then kicked him into the weeds. That was a close one! :o
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When I see em, the only kicken I do is kicken into high gear.
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I think that is the most vivid coloring I've ever seen on an adult cottonmouth in Tennessee. It must be a relatively young one, but it looks pretty good-sized. Most of the time, western cottonmouths tend to turn almost black as they get older. The eastern and florida subspecies retain a little more color. Maybe he just shed his skin.
You can see some cottonmouths in the Mississippi River basin in West Tennessee and Mississippi, but I don't think I've ever seen one near Nashville. I almost stepped on a massasauga once in West Tennessee too. They've got more poisonous snakes than we do here (another reason not to live near Memphis :) ).
I've encountered a couple timber rattlers in the Stone Door area, and I saw a few dead near the Caney last year on the road between Betty's and Kirby. I've never seen a copperhead in the wild around here - every time someone says they've found one, it turns out to be a water snake or corn snake.
bd
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I wouldn't know about any of the above. Look away and I'm eastbound out of sight when someone yells snake.
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They've been sited on Turnbull by a reliable source, that's to blame close.
Grumpy
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I could have gone a couple more years without reading this thread! :P
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I was kicking around online and found this .pdf, with some interesting information on cottonmouths and how to identify them.
http://www.tennsnakes.org/Cottonmouth%20Brochure.pdf
The range map in the bottom corner of the first page caught my eye. It lists an "introduced population" of cottonmouths in Coffee County. WTF? Who goes around stocking cottonmouths? ???
bd
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Back in the 70's, My uncle killed a Cotton Mouth in Van Buren Co. and I have only seen water snakes since then...
I am with you who on earth would introduce cotton mouths?
I like the underside of the tail id tip on your pdf....
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I am with you who on earth would introduce cotton mouths?
On second thought, maybe we could stock some on the Caney to cut the canoe traffic down. ;D
bd
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There are already plenty of Rattlers in the area.
I think getting someone to hide around the cave above Betty’s and play the banjo as the canoes float by might put the fear into them. Most of them don’t seem to get out of the city much. Last year Jarrod and I laughed all day when each group came by and saw the cows standing in the river. They all wanted to call someone to save those poor stuck cows. No kidding, several of them asked us who they should call. And the rest would paddle over to take a picture. Cows!,, there just Cows!! I kept waiting and praying one would try to pet the Bull. I had my camera on standby. :D
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The lovely TWRA you just got love them,i've heard rumore of black bear around the preist area. Really dont know how much truth is to it.We already have enough snakes around to go adding cottenmouths to the list.
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The lovely TWRA you just got love them,i've heard rumore of black bear around the preist area. Really dont know how much truth is to it.We already have enough snakes around to go adding cottenmouths to the list.
Well, like them or not, there are Cottenmouths in this area. As I have stated previously, they were around when I was growing up and I am sure they haven't died off.
This is good article: http://nashville.about.com/cs/animalspets/a/snakes.htm
There is a likelihood that some get misidentified and there is a possibility that the one on the first page could be. Look at the bands on the body compared to the photo from the link.
Anyway, like everyone, I don't mind seeing them, I just don't want to interact with them.
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I dont mind seeing them either, as long as I have just blasted them with the 12 gauge.
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I dont mind seeing them either, as long as I have just blasted them with the 12 gauge.
You ought to be pretty busy with that snake ranch of yours, did you ever get that 10'anapyrattlmouth that blame near turned the tractor over that day :o
Grumpy
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There are already plenty of Rattlers in the area.
Here is a study on Timber Rattle Snakes on Center Hill Lake pages 6 & 7 of the PDF.
http://www.orn.usace.army.mil/pao/pdf/2007/JuneDigest.pdf
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Speaking of snakes, I stumbled across these two at my house a couple of weeks ago. They started in a flower bed in the front yard before rolling out into the driveway. Naturally, I grabbed my camera, put on some "boom chicka bow wow" music and tried to direct. :D
(http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh15/dsharley/Kings.jpg)
(http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh15/dsharley/Kings4.jpg)
(http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh15/dsharley/Kings3.jpg)
(http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh15/dsharley/Kings2.jpg)
I'm sure that these two will inspire even more snake activity at the home. But, as these are kingsnakes and as they enjoy eating copperheads and other poisonous snakes, I'm sort of ok with it. Just sort of.
Please keep the cottonmouths to the west and south of us. I'm originally from Memphis, and I had my fill of them when I was younger. But, in my 15 years of living in Middle Tennessee, I've seen plenty of copperheads, water snakes, rat snakes, garter snakes and black racers ... but never a cottonmouth or rattlesnake. Hopefully, it stays that way.
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Speaking of rattlers. I was mountain biking through Percy Warner park in the late 90's before the granola eaters closed the trails to bikes and a group of us ran across a really fat timber rattler sunning on the side of the trail.
I wanted to ride off but one of the guys decides it would be a good thing to kill it. Ummm, that requires, even with a stick, to get close. No one got bit but I always thought that was the worst decision he ever made.
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My Walker Hound was bitten on 2 occasions. First time on her lip the second time on her paw. Never saw the snake on either occasion but she had a hard time. Her face blew up like a twice the size and her leg got huge. The Vet shot her up with antibiotics and anti venom and diauretics. Took about 3 days and she was back to her good old natured self.
I live near Woodbury and the rattler population is "adequate" to say the least. That picture on the first page looks more like a timber rattler.
I had an encounter with a Cottonmouth while fishing OHL a couple weeks ago. I was about 30 yards from shore throwing at the bank and this guy came tearing out to the boat. I saw it coming and wacked him with a paddle as he tried to get in the boat. He swam about 10 feet away and made a turn and came back and I wacked him again. Since then I've put a .38 in my tackle box and loaded it with snake shot. Never had a snake act so aggressive like. Ive been wading and had water snakes charge and flick them with my rod and they beat it. I usually carry my .38 when Im in the creeks but never took it in the boat till that OHL encounter.
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I had an encounter with a Cottonmouth while fishing OHL a couple weeks ago.
What part of Old Hickory? I've never seen one there.
I've lived on Old Hickory for about 23 years - leaving only for three years of school in Knoxville and about a year in an apartment in Antioch. I moved to Station Camp Creek in 1986, then got a house on Bledsoe Creek for a couple years, and now I live on the lower end on Drake's Creek. I've spent a lot of time on the lake and there just isn't much ideal cottonmouth habitat there. It's not swampy enough.
We used to see them all the time when I lived in Mississippi, before my family moved to Tennessee. One thing's for sure - when you see one in the water, they're easy to identify because they don't swim like a water snake. If there were some around here I'd like to find them. I'm not much of a photographer, but I'd like to try to get some pictures.
bd
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I was kicking around online and found this .pdf, with some interesting information on cottonmouths and how to identify them.
http://www.tennsnakes.org/Cottonmouth%20Brochure.pdf
The range map in the bottom corner of the first page caught my eye. It lists an "introduced population" of cottonmouths in Coffee County. WTF? Who goes around stocking cottonmouths? ???
bd
From 1990-1997 I lived in Tullahoma. I became friends one of the local TWRA Biologist and one day he mentioned that there was a population of water moccasins that had been introduced by a property owner on a small lake bear or in the Little Duck River near Old Stone Fort State Park. So there must be a few in that area.
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I have been told by a Nashville bud that Cottonmouths are around Nashville with Spotted Owl Gore's warm spell.
I had a 3 foot Copperhead couple of weeks back in road near my house, that was the maddest snake I ever saw, was trying to bite any and everything. I've spent most of my off time in my life outside, and only ran into 3 rattlers