Herpetologist Karl Schmidt in 1957 meticulously recorded his own death after being bitten by a boomslang.
Herpetologist Karl Schmidt in 1957 meticulously recorded his own death after being bitten by a boomslang.
#RESIST
And that right there is why I live in Alaska. Fuck snakes. I'll take brown bears in my yard any day.
I lived with lots of snakes in my youth. I was actually bit one time but I never identified the snake that bit me on the hand as I was walking down a trail in a cut bank to a creek bottom. Fortunately it wasn't poisonous but I never knew that for a about an hour. I went back to find the snake and it was gone. I knew a kid in Columbus NM that lost 2 fingers to a bite from a diamond back. You may not die but the poison will kill tissues and muscle.
No poisonous snakes where I live now but it took me a long time to drop my guard once I moved here. I had some seriously close encounters with poisonous snakes when I lived and worked in AZ. Just about everyone I worked with on a survey crew carried a 22 revolver for poisonous snakes. We looked like a bunch of desperados when we worked in the boonies.
Last edited by Borderland; 05-10-2021 at 08:52 PM.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
Grew up in the piney woods of Central Florida, where diamondbacks abounded, and my grandpop had a house on the Harris chain of lakes, where cottonmouths were common.
One did keep an eye out for all sorts of snakes, even if one wasn't really thinking about it. I caught quite a few different kids as a kid, and even kept a corn snake as a pet for a while.
"You win 100% of the fights you avoid. If you're not there when it happens, you don't lose." - William Aprill
"I've owned a guitar for 31 years and that sure hasn't made me a musician, let alone an expert. It's made me a guy who owns a guitar."- BBI
F that. Where is Rikki Tikki Tavi when you need him?
”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB
https://americanliterature.com/autho...ki-tikki-tavi:
"Nag, come up and dance with death!"
Eye to eye and head to head,
(Keep the measure, Nag.)
This shall end when one is dead;
no one sees what's written on the spine of his own autobiography.
My office at the museum was formerly part of KP Schmidt's lab space. No one is certain if it was there or another room a bit farther down the hall (where his main office was) that he was bitten.
Classic story in the herpetologist world. Really interesting and important biologist during his time and still quite relevant today.
Snake bites are no joke and kill around 100,000 people a year.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-s...ite-envenoming
We have lots of Copperheads around here -- their bite isn't likely to kill an adult human but can make you sick and are dangerous to kids. A couple of years ago at our previous house NE of Atlanta I found a juvenile Eastern Diamondback rattler in our front yard. They aren't supposed to live that far North but there it was sure as heck.