TOPIC: SNAKES?

I hate snakes especially poisonous ones. Best advice I could give is use your nose, I always went by the cucumber smell till I read in a hunting magazine that it wasn't true.... While after reading it I was ginsenging and smelt cucumbers but didn't pay any attention.... Couple minutes later while I was moving the leaves back to dig some a copperhead took off about four inches from my hand......, I'm back to believing in the cucumber thing now..... As for rattlers, ain't many around here but the last tract of timber I worked on a few weeks ago , the place was sposed to be full of em. Never seen any just copperheads though..... Between the snakes heat and damned yellow jackets I hate summer logging

greenupcountydigger wrote:

I hate snakes especially poisonous ones. Best advice I could give is use your nose, I always went by the cucumber smell till I read in a hunting magazine that it wasn't true.... While after reading it I was ginsenging and smelt cucumbers but didn't pay any attention.... Couple minutes later while I was moving the leaves back to dig some a copperhead took off about four inches from my hand......, I'm back to believing in the cucumber thing now..... As for rattlers, ain't many around here but the last tract of timber I worked on a few weeks ago , the place was sposed to be full of em. Never seen any just copperheads though..... Between the snakes heat and damned yellow jackets I hate summer logging

There are two smells that I know of that are related to a nearby Copperhead! One is the smell of fresh cut cucumbers and the other is the smell left on your' hands when you rub real Copper Cents or pennies (not the Copper coated Zinc Core Cents) in between the palms of both hands.


Frank

while I was moving the leaves back to dig some a copperhead took off about four inches from my hand......,

That's why when I find seng and am about to dig, I will take the handle of my seng hoe and move the brush around the area first. I am also always doing a visual scan of the area.

Hi Greenupcountydigger--good topic. Here's my first post on Wildgrown. It seems like sengers and copperheads like the same woods.

My eleven year old called this little guy to my attention while we were root hunting this summer. I had to back him away from it because he's so used to non-poisonous hog nose, garter, ringneck, etc. This was his first poisonous snake. A lot of locals misidentify common water snakes as copperheads, but this was the real deal.

When I was a young guy (a long time ago)... between high school and college I worked for a timeber company that would go in a year or two after a site had been logged and we would kill the rest of the timber during the summer months, and then burn it that fall, and plant pines in it that winter.

I was 18 years old and loved the work in the woods.

When killing the timber we used hatchets and cut a ring around the tree, then another guy that came along behind us would squirt a chemical in the cut and that did the tree in.

I know what you mean about snakes and yellow jackets...

When you have 30 or so guys lined up going thru the woods cutting rings around trees - YOU WILL FIND - every yellow jacket, hornet, woods bumble bee nest, and just about every coper head and rattler in the woods.

By the end of summer we were so jumpy that a horse fly could buz by and 30 big stout guys would run like little girls

One of the worst feelings I ever had was I had moved up to a small hickory tree and started to cut my ring around it. There was a cedar tree about 3' away. And after my 3 or 4th lick on the tree I heard this buzzzz start roaring up... and yep right there in that cedar tree was a black hornets nest and several of them were already headed my way.

Got stung 5 times on the back while I was running for all I could do.

We usually killed 8-10 coper heads a week, and 1-2 rattlers. I used to keep the rattle snake - they are decent eating. Very white meat - much like frog legs. All you really get is a narrow strip along the backbone - the rest is rib cage and thin.

I have never smelled a snake before I saw him or heard him. I have heard that it can be done but so far has not worked out for me.

Good Luck to All on avoiding them this year.

Keep your eyes and ears and nose open !

TNhunter

Yellow jackets are just evil..... Guy I was cutting for had a jd 640g skid deer and the door would rattle on it. U was constant shutting my saw off and looking around because of it.... Last year while out ginsenging I was almost back to the four wheeler and heard rattling, I'd stopped and looked around and it was a huge blacks American rattling its tale in the leaves..... Hope y'all have good luck I'm looking forward to the 1st, a guy I know told me a holler to go in that he was I. Years ago and said it was loaded

A huge black snake