EP 606. Snake!!!

I grew up in the Mississippi Delta and it’s like Satan himself was embodied in the form of a cottonmouth moccasin

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today we’re going to cover a topic that strikes fear in the heart of most people, especially down here in the Deep South, but not only the Deep South, and today’s topic is snakes. You grow up in my part of the world, especially as a duck hunter, anybody spends any time out in the woods, including little boys crawling creek banks, you watch where you step. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta and it’s like Satan himself was embodied in the form of a cottonmouth moccasin. Of course, you grow up and you realize they ain’t all bad and making the rounds and kind of educating a lot of people since I was a little boy, is a herpetologist, a local herpetologist named Mr. Terry Vandeventer. Terry, how the heck are you?

Terry Vandeventer: I’m fine. I’m busy taking care of snakes and studying snakes and I’m in heaven, I’ve done this my whole life.

Ramsey Russell: What did you do? Like back in the era I can remember being in high school and you coming into classrooms with 7.5ft diamondback rattlers and put them on a desk top. What was your job back in the day?

Well, when I was 4 years old, I found my first snake and I was never afraid, my parents, they never made any effort to tell me the snakes were bad or to be afraid of them or anything like that

Terry Vandeventer: Well, when I was 4 years old, I found my first snake and I was never afraid, my parents, they never made any effort to tell me the snakes were bad or to be afraid of them or anything like that. So I’ve always been fascinated by them. And I moved down here from Illinois in 1976 to take a position at the Jackson Zoo and I renovated the reptile collection there.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Terry Vandeventer: And worked there for a few years and then went out on my own doing my live programs that you referred to. So I’ve lived in Mississippi over half my life.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. The best half, probably.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, I grew up in the great corn desert of Illinois.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t think of Illinois having a whole bunch of snakes. Do they have a lot of snakes?

Terry Vandeventer: Illinois is like Mississippi. It’s a long state, it’s a tall state, north to south. Mississippi has Appalachian Mountains and we have Barry Islands in the Gulf of Mexico. So we have lots of habitats running north to south. So we have lots of different kinds of snakes. Illinois was the same way. And Illinois actually in the day had the highest densities of venomous snakes of practically anywhere in the United States, but not anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about growing up as a little boy in Illinois and talk a little bit about your parent because every parent I knew growing up, they put the fear of God into you about snakes, no matter what kind of snake it was.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, where I lived, it was an agricultural area, so the venomous snakes in that region had disappeared years before the last timber rattlesnake was killed in Cumberland County when I was like 10 or something and I’m 72 years old and still going. But they didn’t teach me to be afraid, they weren’t worried about that. And as a youngster, I found snakes. I went after them and rode my bicycle to places, and later when I could drive a car, look out, because I was everywhere.

Ramsey Russell: Fair enough question, I think though. But as a little boy growing up in farm country, I wonder what was different about you than me that you were catching snakes and I was catching, boy, I knew what a ribbon snake was and a garter snake and a king snake, but I had my old trusty pellet rifle and anything else was a goner. Did you ever go through that little boy phase with a pellet gun or were snakes something different to you?

Terry Vandeventer: No, all my friends did. I would shoot sparrows and starlings, which of course are non-native, I’d shoot those to feed my snakes, feed my rat snakes and things. And when my dad went fishing or hunting, I went with him, but I went snake hunting. He was my means of getting there, I’d be out waiting chest deep, catching water snakes and turtles and things while he was fishing. And so I didn’t grow up in a real hunting atmosphere. But we shot bows and arrows and we shot 22 rifles and went out. But I really wasn’t a hunter in the form of, what you think of today.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. What did you do with all the snakes you caught? I mean, did you have the collection?

Terry Vandeventer: Oh, yeah, I brought them. They were in my bedroom, I had cages in my bedroom. When I was 16 and I could drive, a couple of buddies and I took our first snake hunt safari to Florida and caught snakes. I kept them for pets. I kept a collection, a postage stamp collection, I had one king snake, one ribbon snake, that kind of thing. And later, as I became more educated and just mature, I studied them more and more. Back in the day, we licked a stamp, so there’s some guy my age in Southern California and I’d say, we’re coming to Southern California to look for snakes, can we sleep on your floor? And it was always, yes, always. And then they take us out to their special places and we’d hunt snakes. And so it was just something that we did. And in the day, there probably weren’t a hundred of us in the whole United States, but at least, private hobbyists, so to speak. But now there’s a million in the United States, people who in some manner, keep snakes or pets, study snakes academically or whatever. And we have a lot of protected species and some of the reasons they’re protected is because we don’t want people catching them and taking them away.

My mother has stories, plural, of my having snakes as a little boy and snakes and turtles and lizards and all kinds of stuff you put in glass and some of those nights got loose

Ramsey Russell: My mother has stories, plural, of my having snakes as a little boy and snakes and turtles and lizards and all kinds of stuff you put in glass and some of those nights got loose.

Terry Vandeventer: Oh, of course.

Ramsey Russell: And I learned after the first event not to let anybody know, it turn up. You’d be walking across the den, hopefully it was you instead of your mom, you’d be walking across somewhere there go that snake and you catch him. And I can just remember hair curdling screams, when mama found him instead of me. And then my own wife who is morbidly afraid of snakes or certainly was for the most part of her life, we’ve got stories when my little boys would catch snakes and turn them loose. And they grew up and it was important to me, I was in wildlife and timber, spent a lot of time cruising timber, doing stuff and I would sometimes find non-venomous snakes, scoop them up, put them in my vest, bring them home, show the kids, kind of stuff like that.

Terry Vandeventer: It’s generational. Your great grandpa killed every snake he saw. Your grandpa and maybe not so much. Your father maybe killed only the venomous ones and it’s generational and people learn. People smoke cigarettes, then they stopped and they don’t do it anymore. They drank and maybe drove under the influence and they don’t do it anymore and they didn’t wear seatbelts, but now they do, you can change, you can learn and you can change and people do. And I know people who were deathly afraid of snakes and now they aren’t and they find them fascinating. This idea that people say, well maybe I just have a natural born fear of snakes, I’ve heard that my whole life. And we would wave that off and say, well actually babies, little children have to be taught to be afraid by their elders who love them. And well, we’re rethink now that maybe there is such a thing as natural born fear of snakes that goes way back.

Ramsey Russell: Back to the Bible. Because we talked about this the other day, he shall bite your heel and you shall smoke his head.

Terry Vandeventer: Right.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to smoke that snake’s head.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. And I’m not a biblical scholar, but I’ve always believed and people have told me that, it was Satan in the form of a serpent and actually serpents and snakes are technically different.

Ramsey Russell: Want to talk about that Genesis, and once in that story of Adam and Eve and Satan in the form of snake, betrayed him, God condemned snake.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. And every church teaches it differently, and there’s different versions of the Bible and such. But I’m here to tell you today, snakes are not evil. Snakes intrinsically are good things, they are not evil things. The evil things are sitting in this room right now, human beings. We are the only creatures on the planet that are capable of being evil. You know that a fox catching a rabbit, that fox is not an evil thing, he’s not doing anything bad, he’s not doing anything wrong, it’s all a perfectly natural thing. So snakes aren’t evil things, but people are taught and people choose to believe and that’s okay. But I don’t think snakes should be maligned or killed because of teachings in Sunday school, that’s my opinion.

Ramsey Russell: And I’m just trying to find a basis of why everybody is so scared of snakes.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, think about if you’re a caveman 20,000 years ago in France and we discussed this the other day, that caveman knew what death looked like, he knew what a cave bear would do to you, it would rip you to shreds and eat you, they knew this. They knew if you fell off a cliff, what death looked like. But a snake, it’s a little twig. It’s got beautiful colors and it’s got lichen and moss looking colors and as you walk by, that twig scratches you like a thorn, big deal, right? And then the swelling comes and the discoloration and maybe even death, all from a little scratch of a twig. Well, we know that twig was a camouflage snake. And most snakes, most venomous snakes rely on their camouflage to protect them from you and me and from other predators. But there’s some snakes, like in Africa, like mambas, for example, that are very long and slender, very quick, and they would bite and disappear, and they might not even see the snake. But I think that there’s kind of a genetic memory that goes way back that tells us walk around that thing. chimpanzees will throw sticks at snakes, they’ll throw rocks at snakes, they know that that’s something to leave alone. And we’re supposedly more advanced than chimpanzees, right? But we kill snakes, don’t we?

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. Well, it’s funny you say that because, I have spent a lot of my life as a biologist, as a forester, doing research in college, cruising timber, hunting in some really snake infested country and I’ve never been bitten. I had one dog one time, we were teal hunting, it was shallow water, it was September, the dog jumped up on the bike as we walked up to it and she yipped like I had nicked her with a collar. I’m like, what the heck? And she acted like she’d been scolded. And we got back to camp, I fed her, put her in her box, when I walked back out, her foot was big as a softball.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And as I started looking at it, there were two little fang marks in between two toes, a little cottonmouth had been laying there and she stepped on it, got bit, that’s the only time. And I worked down in South Texas, close to the border and you would spend months on that ranch when it was hot as Hades in August, September, mid-October, not see a snake, not hear it, not worry about a snake. But when those temperatures started cooling late around Halloween, there were creepy crawlies everywhere. One time, my wife, well, she’s now my wife, she was my girlfriend came down to stay with me, we were in just a little hand me down cabin and my door, my bedroom just a screen door, walked out to the backyard and she opened the back door to do something, she goes, like, I’m going to fall for this, like I don’t know you and you’re trying to scare me about a rattlesnake. And I got up and looked and had you just stepped out of that screen? If you just open that screen door and stepped out, going to the truck, not paying attention, you just step right square on that snake’s back about a 5ft rattler.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And that was my rule back then was out in the woods, I leave them be, if they were inside the compound, they were a goner. But it’s funny, like I had little Springer Spaniels at the time running around, just crawling up through bushes, they never got bit. They knew intuitively to go around that buzzing sound.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, generally, where do dogs get bit? On the nose. They stick the nose down there –

Ramsey Russell: That’s the best place for them to get hit up, that’s what the Californian told me.

Terry Vandeventer: There’s no good place to get bit, but they stick their nose down there. And back in the day I know that quail hunting pointers would point a rattlesnake sometimes and get bit. But stepping on a venomous snake, out in the forest, out in thousands of acres, your foot coming down perfectly on a snake, that’s kind of hard to do, but it happens, we know it happens.

Ramsey Russell: Well, people hit the powerball all the time, so we know it can happen.

Most snake bites in the United States are the result of a conscious, deliberate interaction with the snake

Terry Vandeventer: Most snake bites in the United States are the result of a conscious, deliberate interaction with the snake. That is, you see the snake rather than stepping back and walking around it, you choose to approach it and try to kill it or try to pick it up or interact with it in some way. We are the architects of our own misfortune. If you see that big rattlesnake there and you walk around it, once you’ve seen it, it can’t hurt you, can it? No. Once you’ve laid eyes on it, that snake can’t hurt you anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Just walk around him.

Terry Vandeventer: You’ve seen it, you back away.

Ramsey Russell: Even a big rattlesnake has got a relatively short strike length.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. If there’s such a thing as a 6ft rattlesnake, his strike length would be 2ft to 3ft, 1/3^rd to a half of his length.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. So, two steps back, just step back twice and you are absolutely safe. The point being, once you’ve seen the snake, you’ve rendered it totally harmless, it cannot hurt you now, you’ve seen it. But if you choose at that point in time to get a stick or your gun or whatever and step in on that snake and kill it, now, there’s a chance you could be bitten. And the majority of snake bites in the United States of America, the majority of snake bites happen during the killing or handling of a wild snake in the field. So we know good and well people step on them and they get bit. People put their hands on them and they get bit. But most bites – Mississippi has 3.3 million people, we have 125 snake bites on the average per year and no fatalities. We hear about them, we check on them and we can’t find any. So in this day and age, you get bit, you go to the hospital, you get anti-venom and you go home, you get better. But 125 bites a year out of 3.3 million people, that’s not very many bites, it really isn’t. And yet half of those bites are people messing with a snake. You climb a ladder, you reach further than you should, and you fall off the ladder. You knew not to do that, but you did. And people often kill a snake with the idea, I need to kill the snake so I don’t get bit, then they get bit. And I’ve interviewed many snake bite patients, I don’t call them victims, patients. And they say, well, it just jumped out and bit me. And then you talk to their buddy out in the waiting room, it’s not exactly what happened at all. So if you don’t kill snakes, you’re not going to get bit. I mean, the chances of getting bit are – so they say that the chances of you dying of a snake bite are less than a vending machine falling on you and killing you. When you kick that Coke machine because it didn’t give you your drink, and you kick it and it falls on you, they say that when you look at the statistics that less people die of snake bite than vending machines.

Ramsey Russell: Well, my son Forrest used to have one in little factoid animal books when he was a child. And one of the statistics in there was more people die from falling coconuts then die from snake bites and shark bites.

Terry Vandeventer: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never heard of anybody dying of a fallen coconut. But I actually did know a lady not too far from here in Byram that 25, 30 years ago, maybe a little bit longer died out there just on her hands and knees waiting her flower bed, got bit by copperhead, killed her, she was our age.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, again, we can’t document any snake bite deaths in 75 years, that’s what I’m saying. We hear many times the same story over and over again in various parts of Mississippi, verbatim. My uncle was doing this, and he got bit, and this happened. And then you’ll be up in the Delta and you hear exactly the same story word for word. Then you’re in Tishomingo county and hear the same story. And with social media, that really takes it. So, Mississippi State Poison Control Center investigates these, and we see obituaries in the newspaper. Billy Joe got bit by rattlesnake on Friday, died services on Monday. And there’s obviously a very dead person involved and I’m not trying to be glib or insulting, but when we investigate it, well, there was no picture of a snake, there’s no dead snake because people always kill it afterwards and there was no medical reason for that person to be dead by means of snake bite. But people, must have been a rattler. And that’s human nature, I’m not putting anybody down by this. We’re all human and it’s human nature.

Ramsey Russell: Well, chances are he died of a heart attack. Snakes do not scare me, the venomous snakes do not scare me. But any snake will give me a freaking heart attack if he gets to jump on me. And that’s the snake that I’m putting my foot down. For example, I was in a duck blind down in Louisiana a couple seasons ago, teal blind early teal season September, we’re sitting there, it’s in the dark, we walk in with our lamps on, we’ve been hunting, we’ve been talking, been carrying on, drinking coffee, shooting ducks for an hour and right there at eyeball level on that blind, eyeball level, that snake had been there for an hour and a half, it was a 5ft water snake, common water snake and it wasn’t until his tongue flicked at eyeball level did I realise. And son, I know for a fact my heart skipped two beats and just my reaction, one man stepped out of the blind completely, he knew something, it scared the whole blind with that reaction.

Terry Vandeventer: It will make you act silly. Yeah, well, I was out working in my yard in Byram, a house we owned over there and my wife had left a garden hose out and I was doing something, I turned around and there’s a garden hose and I jumped, whoa. And then I looked around and said, I hope nobody saw that. School buses would go by and the kids would wave to me, I said, I hope they didn’t see me jump over that garden hose. I’ve worked with snakes from Canada, across the entire United States, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and 11 years in the Amazon where they have real snakes. And I have stepped on, stepped next to, sat down next to, put my hands next to, and walked by, and this is what I do for a living. But as I’ve walked by thousands upon thousands of venomous snakes, it’s what I do. And I’ve never had one strike at me as I passed or as I sat down next to him. I’ll move, I will relocate when that happens rather quickly sometimes, but I’ve never had one strike at me, even though I’ve stepped on them and put my hands next to him accidentally. The best thing for a snake do is stay still, stay quiet, stay still and let that danger pass by. Now, we know that people get bit on the foot, we know they do, it happens for sure, but not nearly to the level that people think. And you and I have both walked by highly venomous snakes that we never saw and we don’t know when it happened or where it happened. But nothing happened, did it?

Ramsey Russell: No. That’s really in common. I’m going to share that story that really helped me find peace. As a little boy that grew up in the Delta and cottonmouth moccasins were Satan embodied and there was nothing that black snake with that mouth open, all he’s trying to do is say, they don’t step here. Let me tell you what, for the first 50 years of my life, if I saw that, it was like Satan himself had entered my life. And I’m going to tell you, the only time – I know another guy, a buddy of mine who was a forester in the Delta forever, and he was telling me the story, they’d gone out to an oxbow lake, he was off, he wasn’t cruising timber, he was off, of course wearing his knee boots, his rubber knee boots, lacrosse knee boots and he said, I can’t believe, born and raised on the banks of Lake Washington my whole life in the Delta, I just can’t believe that I didn’t think to look under that boat before – a little aluminum boat, he’s just going to push off on the banks, he said, I can’t believe that I didn’t, because you always look before you lift something like that. And he said it was that time of year that a hundred yards on either side of this little makeshift boat ramp I was pushing my boat off of, there were people sitting on 5 gallon buckets fishing with cane poles. And he said, I slid it off and it’s like a stick hit my calf, and I looked down and that snake had put the fangs out and penetrated just deep enough into that rubber boot to stick. So when I jump, he jumps with me. I’m running and screaming, I’m swinging my leg, he says, trying to shake this snake. My buddy’s behind me with a 5ft stick trying to hit him and every time he goes to swing the stick, I move my leg. He said, finally, the snake flings off, I’m about to have a heart attack and I look and he says, 200 yards either side of me, there’s not a human soul, there’s buckets turned over and cane poles floating off in the water, the snake is gone and he said it was the most scared I’ve ever been. But where I found this absolute change of heart, especially with, because rattlesnakes get a bad rap and a lot of the world is, we were in grad school, I would go out August, September, October, November till first frost, and we would collect regeneration data in hardwood clear cuts. And it was where somebody, 10, 15 years ago had gone and monumented with a piece of PVC, a plot center, we had to hack our way for miles through clear cuts and find all these plot centers, pull a 10^th acre plot and collect all these trees. And it’s just dense jungle dog hair, thick clear cut. And one day it was hot, it was hot as blaze. It could have been August, could have been September, we were down in Warren county near Redwood, Mississippi, and cutting our way out. And I was about to have a heat stroke, it’s time to get the truck, turn on the air, drink some ice water, we’ve been out in that mess all day long. And rather than kind of go the long distance, I just put my hands over my head and got down low and balled up through a bunch of briars. And the boy behind me grabbed the seat of my pants and yanked me back, said, what the heck, do you not hear that? Well, I was hot I’m deaf, my ears were ringing, I don’t hear nothing. He pointed and there’s a big old cane brake just sitting there. That cane brake was coiled up and buzzing, my head could not have been more than a foot from where he was sitting, didn’t do nothing. And we got to where the truck was parked, it was some of that old sunken, you’ve seen how them roads will sink into the hillside, those hills and there was a tree that falling across, the road right there. And as we were getting our cruise vest off and getting everything done and getting bottles of water and getting ready to load up and go, we counted about 7 or 8 rattlers sitting there sunning and just enjoying the day on top of that log. And at that moment I just realized it’s no telling how many snakes we had been within feet or inches of throughout that whole day. And they just left us alone. And then when I was cruising later at Dahomey woods, every now and again you’d walk up on a canebrake and I’d take my little, I kept a 5ft stick with me for plot center and I would pet his back or stroke him, I could never get one to even buzz or coil up. All they want to do is just go on about their business.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, in my career, I’ve encountered in the field over 2,000 rattlesnakes.

Ramsey Russell: In Mississippi?

Terry Vandeventer: No. In Mississippi, about 200 rattle snakes in Mississippi. And of these 2,000 rattlesnakes in my career, including Mississippi, I’ve had 18 rattle at me before I saw them. In other words, they gave themselves away. I would not have seen them, they were off to the side and I would never have seen them except they rattled. So all of the other ones stay quiet, the ones I found, who knows how many I didn’t see. But out of 2000, only 18 rattled before I actually saw them giving themselves away. Now of those other snakes when I began to manipulate them, either to catch them or take their picture, sure. Yeah, then they’d start rattling for sure. They realized they’d been made and now it’s time to get down to brass tacks. So they would rattle and get defensive and try to run away or back away. But the rattlesnake who rattles is, he’s a dead rattlesnake. He’s not going to last very long if he rattles. Now we hear this myth about wild hogs are making rattle less these days, people killing snakes make some – the idea, which is, a valid idea, is that the rattlesnakes rattle the hogs, get them and kill them and the ones that don’t are more calm and they pass those calm genes along to their babies and those babies don’t rattle, well, that’s really not the case. What it is, is they don’t rattle anyway. Like I say, they don’t rattle anyway. In Mississippi I’ve had one and it was a female canebrake timber rattlesnake down in Claiborne County and we watched her for 19 years we watched her. We went down every August, September a couple times, and we observed her.

Ramsey Russell: How’d you know it was the same snake?

Terry Vandeventer: Oh, yeah, it’s like a fingerprint, they’re different, they have different colors, we took pictures, they have different complexions and things, we knew it was her. And she would rattle when we came, but she would return to the spot every third and fourth year to have babies. They have a really low reproductive rate and we would find dad there, occasionally, same male, same one, and then they clear cut the area and they made a gravel pit out of it and it’s gone. But she rattled at us, she would give herself away. But she was pregnant and in kind of an open area and I think, well, need I say more, she was pregnant. So, she was emotional and such. But the last thing a snake wants to do is bite a person, and so snakes don’t attack people. When someone gets bit by a snake, the, the newspapers, the media, the TV, it was a snake attack. No, it wasn’t. It was a defensive thing on the part of the snake. And like I say, most of the times it’s a human attack on the snake that when they got bit, but snakes don’t attack people. Their venom is valuable to them. Their venom is for getting their next meal and it’s an expensive process for that snake to produce venom. It takes energy and such. And once they produce that venom, it’s valuable to them. And I’m giving them human characteristics here by saying they don’t want to do this or they find it valuable, but really the last thing they want to do is waste on you. But they will if you are of the nature that you’re going to attack that snake and try to kill it or if you step on one, most times they do not bite when you step on them, we’ve proven that, we’ve done experiments, we use graduate students, who will do anything for a grade. But that’s been studied and it’s been shown that most times they don’t bite when you step on them, they stay still and they wait for you to pass. But again, we know that they do bite from time to time people step on them, they do get bit, we know that. On adult men, thumb and first finger, generally catching or trying to pick up a snake, get a selfie done, that kind of thing. Like I said, we don’t know of any snake bite fatalities in Mississippi, but we know of some extremely serious situations where people have been bitten and the family was called in, but they got better and they survived. There have been some really silly, and I won’t go into it, but some absolutely ludicrous situations of people getting bit, doing silly things, crazy things. And afterwards, I’m sure they’re pretty embarrassed by it.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to share one I saw, somebody show me a video of and it was at a snake catching rodeo. They were catching water snakes, whoever catches the most by poundage wins. And he said, let me show you this video. And of course, this story involved copious amounts of big tall beers.

Terry Vandeventer: 50% of all snake bites involve alcohol.

Ramsey Russell: And they had a big old water snake, not a cottonmouth, a water snake, Nerodia. And he handed the guy’s phone and pulled down his pants and bent over and want a video of that water snake striking him in the butt. Well, male anatomy being what it was when he bent over the snake bullseye, those testicles. Hey, hate me if you want to, I laughed so hard when I saw that video, I couldn’t stand. You get what you deserve, hold my beer.

Terry Vandeventer: What did I say? And yeah, it’s pretty remarkable. But we have 56 different kinds of snakes in Mississippi only 6 are venomous. We’ve got the timber or canebrake rattler, same snake, also called a velvet tail. So snakes often go by different names. So we got that guy, we’ve got the big eastern diamondback rattlesnake from Hattiesburg to the coast, it’s in the longleaf pine country in south Mississippi. And then we have pygmy rattlesnakes, which are often called ground rattlers, they’re 18 inches, 2ft long. Contrary to popular opinion, they do indeed have a rattle, like all rattlesnakes do. People find little gray snakes around their garden and around their house in the monkey grass and they call those ground rattlers and they’re not. Earth snakes, that’s exactly right. They’re found, not in the delta, but they’re found all over the state in spotty locations. They’re not here in Terry, Mississippi. But they are just south of here in Kapaya County. And then we have copperheads and we have cottonmouths, water moccasin, stump tail, blunt tail, gaper, all different names for him, but his name is a cottonmouth. The reason we use that is because water moccasin is also used for non-venomous water snakes.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. If it’s in the water, it’s water moccasin.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. But if it’s in the water and you say that’s a cottonmouth, everybody knows what you’re talking about. If you say it’s a water moccasin, people might say, well, yeah, but is it the harmless one or the venomous one?

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Vandeventer: And then we have another one and what’s the other one?

Ramsey Russell: Coral snake.

Terry Vandeventer: Coral snake. A lot of people don’t realize we have coral snakes in Mississippi. From about Franklin county in the Homochitto, there’s one record. And then from a little north of Hattiesburg over to Waynesboro again, down in the longleaf pine country toward the coast. Myself, I’ve collected one live specimen myself.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never even seen one, not in North America. But we were talking about this the other day too, that coral snake is that red touch yellow, harm a fella, red touch black, friend of Jack, that’s the old saying. And I was down in Argentina and a beautiful snake crossed the road and I said, stop, I got out to look at it, they thought, well, I reached down to pick it up and the whole truck went ballistic, do not touch that snake. Well, I had looked red touch black, that rule doesn’t apply when you leave wherever coral snakes are in North America, because this was a big old coral snake.

Terry Vandeventer: Across the Rio Grande –

Ramsey Russell: This was a big old coral.

Terry Vandeventer: Everything changes. Coral snakes in South America be 6ft long, big rounds like baseball bats sometimes. So they’re different. And coral snakes in Mississippi generally are 2ft to 30 inches long, slender, they don’t have a big head. They are quite uncommon. Like I say, I’ve caught one, I’ve had a dozen brought to me over 50 years, and it seems that quite a few in Pearl River county, but still not common by any stretch. So we’ve recorded 3 bites over the years, and in each case, the person was in some manner handling the snake when they got bit. A lot of the sporting magazines will have their yearly snake article in the springtime, and they’ll always tell you that the coral snake has no fangs, or his fangs are in the back of the mouth, or he can’t open his mouth very big because he’s a little tiny mouth and he has to chew on you and he has to bite you between the fingers or between the toes. And all of that stuff is guaranteed to get you dead because it’s all false. And I say that facetiously because we haven’t had a coral snake fatality in United states since the 60s.

Ramsey Russell: How many snakes are there in the entire United States? And how many venomous snakes? Is it still about 6 or 7 total venomous snakes? It’ll be more than that, you got several species of rattlers through the continent.

Terry Vandeventer: Oh, yeah. Arizona has 17 different kinds of rattlers.

Ramsey Russell: 17.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. And we have 3 in Mississippi and Illinois had 2, and Florida’s got 3. Arizona and then California’s got probably off top of my head, 5 or 6, so there’s lots of kinds of rattlesnakes. There’s Sidewinders, Mojave rattlers, Western Diamondbacks, Prairie Rattlers, there’s all kinds, but people will often, simplify it and they say there’s rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, copperheads and coral snakes, that’s very simplistic.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Vandeventer: Our Mississippi rattlesnakes are as different from each other as they are from a cottonmouth, just about. So we have 6 in Mississippi, 3 rattlesnakes, copperhead, cottonmouth, coral snake.

Ramsey Russell: What is the most aggressive or most dangerous of the North American snakes? Like, I know we talk coral snake neurotoxin, but at the same time, I’ve never seen one, few people see Them. Yeah, you’d have to really work hard to get bit, but what would be the most, probably rattlesnake –

Terry Vandeventer: You have a snake like the coral snake, which has very toxic venom but is relatively easygoing and not quick to bite. And then you’ve got a copperhead, which has much less toxic, far less toxic venom, but they’re a little snappier. So which one –

Ramsey Russell: They always had a bad attitude.

Terry Vandeventer: So which one is more dangerous? Well, the copperhead is more dangerous. Which one’s more deadly? Well, the coral snake would be. So in Mississippi, you almost can’t even consider the coral snake, they’re so rare. But a cottonmouth is probably one of the least dangerous snakes in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: But he’s got the reputation of having a really bad attitude.

Terry Vandeventer: We as humans, look at that cottonmouth, he’s got a flathead, he’s got a frowny look about his face, it looks like he’s scowling. He’s not running away, he’s coiled up and he’s not trying to get away. People say, look at him, he’s looking for trouble, I’ll give him some trouble and then you get a bite. But he’s opening that mouth, he’s showing you his fangs and all this stuff. And we apply human characteristics to that snake and we say, look at him, he’s looking for trouble. Well, no, he’s not, not at all. And I’ve always had a bad habit of, when they open that mouth, I stick the toe of my shoe in their mouth and they don’t bite down on it, they move to the side and they open their mouth back up again. Now, I’m not telling the listeners to go out and do that, please don’t do that. But the point being, he just doesn’t want to bite. But we look at him and say, he’s mean, he’s vicious, he’s aggressive, and here’s where we get in trouble and here’s where you’re going to get people calling in. And that is they don’t chase people. Nobody in the world has ever been chased by a cottonmouth, but thousands upon thousands of people will tell you they have been. And it’s a thorn in my side because as a snake biologist, having seen way more cottonmouths than any of your listeners have ever seen, and tens of thousands from San Angelo, Texas, where the floods are, all the way to North Carolina to Key West, Florida, and up into Illinois, I’ve seen far more, and none of them have ever chased a person or chased me. And yet, if you say that online, you’re going to have 200 people come on and say you’re a liar and I was chased by one and I didn’t stop to video it with my camera or my phone. And it’s troublesome for the educated biologist when you’re confronted with this kind of thing. And so generally I’ll say, well, I’ve heard they’ll do that, I’ve never seen it for myself, but they’re not aggressive and they’re not vicious. They’re simply an animal that’s out there making a living, he’s going to work every day just like we do, and he wants some food, he wants to lie around the sun, catch a few rays, wants to find a girlfriend, and that’s all he wants to do. And if you confront a person with like, well, he can only go 3 miles an hour, it’s his top speed, he has no legs, and it conjures up this comical cartoon image of some guy running down the road and his shoes falling off and he’s looking over his shoulder and his hat’s flying off and there’s a snake chasing him. So it doesn’t do any good to argue the point.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Terry Vandeventer: But the fact is they don’t. And they’re not interested in trouble. They’re simply not interested in trouble. You see him, you take two steps back, wave to him, go about your business, and you’ll be fine. But we also get the argument, well, what if someone else comes by? Or what if I have to work here later and he’s there? Well, that snake disappeared, he’s gone. You’ll never see that snake again. And really, this is not a good subject to even get into because it causes people to bristle and if you and I discussing all these positive points today, if all they hear is cottonmouths don’t chase people. Oh, yes, they do.

Ramsey Russell: Well, here’s the deal, perception is reality. That snake could have been doing a million different things, heading your direction and in your fear, your snap judgment as you recall, as you perceived it, which is reality, that they were chasing you. I’ve never had one come after me, but I have had them come my way. Come down the trail, come down the creek.

Terry Vandeventer: Sure.

Ramsey Russell: Just minding his own business. Like every red blooded American God fearing man that wanted to be a good daddy, I raised my kids to kill cottonmouth and I’m a biologist, I’m a forester, I’m a conservationist, you bet your butt, and I feel like a tell-tale sign on cottonmouth vs water snake, the venomous vs non venomous is, everyone that I can recall having seen cottonmouth was floating on top of the water like a fish bobber. Whereas the water snakes swim mostly under. You see the water moving, you see their head up, they swim differently.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And when my oldest son was a tiny little boy, we’re sitting there just plinking with his little bitty, tiny red rider BB gun and around the bend comes the biggest, baddest cottonmouth on God’s earth I’ve ever seen. And 150 BB shots later, like David and Goliath, he stoned it. And that snake is literally as big around his leg and as long as he was tall. But now it’s funny how I evolved to where going through the clear cuts and cruising timber and just in my little trilogy I’ve gotten to where snakes don’t bother me, I don’t kill them. I might stop and look at them, go around them. And my sons have kind of evolved, neither one of them kills snakes.

Terry Vandeventer: I know somebody that was walking down the trail and found two rattlesnakes that were two males in combat forest and person was challenged by many of his friends is why didn’t you kill those snakes?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Vandeventer: And he said there was no reason to kill them, there’s no reason in the world to kill them. And he became a little bit famous, didn’t he?

Ramsey Russell: How big were those rattlers? You remember that film?

Terry Vandeventer: 4ft or 5ft.

Ramsey Russell: Big fully grown canebrake rattlers, and I believe he was coming out of the turkey wood with a couple of buddies and it looked like two sumo wrestlers going at it and he took a lot of videos and pictures and posted up and it went absolutely viral. And what was going on with that situation?

Terry Vandeventer: Oh yeah. Our pit vipers are generally fall breeders. Now this was a springtime event –

Ramsey Russell: It may have been the fall, I can’t remember.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah, starting right about – Well, I say fall, late summer and fall. Mississippi, do we have fall, do we have summer? But mid August into September –

Ramsey Russell: It may have been they were bow hunting, so it could have been fall.

Terry Vandeventer: Might have been. And male rattlesnakes will fight for territory and breeding rights. And when they meet each other they will go up in the air like arm wrestling and they’ll go up in the air and they’ll twist around and they’ll knock each other down. And in the end the strongest one wins and the other one tucks tail and leaves. There’s almost always somewhere in the vicinity a female watching. You never see her, but biologists know that, they put radios in them and they know what they do and they know there’s a female over there watching the whole thing. So it’s simply a battle, there’s no biting or anything like that, they just wrestle until one gets tired and he leaves and goes home. And then the winner maintains his territory in that area.

Ramsey Russell: How big is their territory? A square mile?

Terry Vandeventer: The studies on timber rattlesnakes, all of the studies are in the north, up in the Appalachian areas, up in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and such. Our southern timber rattlesnakes or canebrake rattlers, there’s not been any studies that I know of on these and those are two really different snakes.

Ramsey Russell: But still it’s have to be, I would guess it was a square mile probably much less.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, probably at the most, yeah. The big indigo snakes, the big 9ft indigo snakes that used to live in Mississippi, we know that males hunt, let me see, 16 acres, I think something like that.

Ramsey Russell: 16, yeah, I would see that. They cover some ground. I see them down in Texas and that was the fastest moving snake I’d ever seen in my life.

Terry Vandeventer: And big for being so fast. So I can’t answer that question on how large a male timber rattlesnakes territory is because there have been studies done in the south, there’s a different situation up the Appalachians, but females have smaller territories, smaller home ranges, males have larger ones. In the breeding season females don’t move around much. Now here it is just, the beginning of July, but in August, male rattlesnakes are going to start taking their licks. People are going to see them on roads, they’re going to kill them, they’re going to see them when they’re cleaning up deer camps and they’re going to kill them.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to ask you before we get into that, like I would think spring or maybe summer, but that’s not necessarily, probably is the fall that most encounters happen.

Terry Vandeventer: Yes. And that’s males on the move, single minded looking for a date, that’s what they’re doing. The females are staying kind of still, not making themselves hard to find. And only a certain number of those females are ready to breed. Some of them are getting ready to have babies, so they’re not looking to breed at all.

Ramsey Russell: What would be your guesstimated density of canebrake rattlers or diamondback rattlers or cottonmouths on a given geography? How would you guesstimate? Because like for example, you say, Terry and in the half your life 35 years you’ve been clambering around Mississippi as a herpetologist, you think 200 rattlers I’d have guessed, you seem thousands upon thousands. I mean, it’s not like there’s an abundance of them apparently.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, the timber and canebrake, we’re using that term changefully same snake is a species of concern for Wildlife Fisheries & Parks. And through the branch which is the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science which is the clearinghouse for non-game species. Their biologists don’t study deer, the department has their own biologists over here to study deer. But we have to have someone who studies non game butterflies for example. So the biologists natural science museum keep track of rare species. And the timber rattlesnake or canebrake rattler is, is a species of concern if that’s the level it’s classified at. Eastern diamondbacks are the same way, but the eastern diamondback is also a candidate for federal protection through US Fish & Wildlife service as a declining species. So none of those are protected specifically in Mississippi, but they are on some level declining. There’s a big old book over there on the shelf, trap the timber rattlesnake, something planned, some biologists got together, some scientists got together to study timber rattlesnakes and see what the situation is, most of their work was in the north. But they came to me and they wanted me to write a chapter for this book and it was to describe the situation of timber rattlesnakes in Mississippi. What did I think was going on in Mississippi? They did it for Alabama and Louisiana too, so on. And I wrote doom and gloom, I said, they’re disappearing rapidly, they’re not found over much of their range anymore, doom and gloom and that book didn’t come out for 25 years, it took that long to do it. And when I received my copy, I read what I wrote and I said whoa, I was totally wrong. And so all snakes are declining. I mean, we’re building mini malls, we’re building roads, all snakes are declining.

Ramsey Russell: Habitat loss and degradation is affecting not only waterfowl, but it’s affecting almost everything.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah, the world is changing.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s like, there’s not as many as you would think there are. There’s not as many snakes as it might seem in certain areas, it’s been my experience.

Terry Vandeventer: That could be one’s perception. People will say boy, the snakes are bad this year, there’s more snakes this year than last year. Well, snakes don’t just magically appear, you may Be doing more work outside and see more snakes than you did last year. But snakes, they’re on the habitat, right? As habitat is changed or habitat is destroyed, all wildlife is affected by that.

Ramsey Russell: But snakes, they’ve got a low reproductive ability. It’s not like they’re trying to populate the world and just take over with maximum sustained yield type in terms of waterfowl abundance, let’s say. I mean, like for example, I was surprised to learn that, you were talking about the snakes breed in the fall.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, our pit vipers do.

Ramsey Russell: The pit vipers breed in the fall. And on that discussion on social media, when Forrest got the picture of them sumo wrestling rattlers, you started talking about their breeding ecology, which I found fascinating. So the winner, the victor of those two snakes might crawl over and breed a female, but then it could be years before she actually releases, that was mind blowing.

Terry Vandeventer: Right. They mate in the late summer and fall and the male leaves his sperm in the female and we know how that works. Then he becomes a deadbeat dad, he leaves, he goes away, he may be 5 miles away for the whole year. And that female has now mated with him, she’s going to go down in a stump hole somewhere, spend the winter, come out in the springtime, and that’s when fertilization will actually take place. She will ovulate and the sperm has been stored in her oviduct all through the winter, it’s active and it’s not active, it’s just sitting there and in the springtime, fertilization takes place.

Ramsey Russell: What if habitat conditions aren’t perfect, she’ll retain that? And maybe go the next year.

Terry Vandeventer: They certainly can. We’ve known snakes go years and then suddenly surprise, babies. Yeah, exactly. So, mate in the fall, go over the winter, fertilization takes place when she comes out in the spring, over the summer, the babies develop and she has them, one year later, from the time she mates with that male. And what’s interesting is that, remember that deadbeat dad? Remember that male bred with her and then took off and disappeared for a year, guess what? When she’s back, she comes back to that same spot where she mated, she has those babies, guess who’s waiting for her?

Ramsey Russell: Who’s waiting on her?

Terry Vandeventer: Dad’s there. Dad’s there for the blessed event and we’ve documented that over and over again. And it has been documented that male rattlesnakes will often position themselves between you as an intruder and his mate and babies, and they’ve even been seem to reach out of a hole in times of danger and get those babies with a crook of their neck and pull them down into the hole to protect them. So we’re talking about parental care.

Ramsey Russell: Do snakes like that seem to have a fidelity for an exact location on the landscape? Like, this is my house, this is where I’m going to go have babies?

Terry Vandeventer: They sure do. And in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, the number one cause of rattlesnake mortality is automobiles. The number two cause is government workers who empty trash cans and things like that. And they will go to these scenic overlooks that people, parking lots, you walk out, you look out over the Smoky Mountains. Some of those places are rookeries where female timber rattlesnakes will gather because it’s perfect for sunning and elevating their body temperature and the right exposure to the sun and they kill those females when they see them. They just do because they’ve always done that, before they ever worked for the Park Service. So I’ve met people who work in national parks who say, I’ll kill every snake I see regardless, that’s the way they are. But, yeah, they have places, this female, we never found her more than about 15ft away from the first place we ever found her and we’ve watched her for 19 years. And that rattlesnake that gets killed might be older than you because timber rattlesnakes are documented to living 50 years.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard it said and this elates a lot of people, there’s only one good snake on earth to a lot of listeners, and that’s a dead one.

Terry Vandeventer: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But I have heard that, if we’re sitting right here in a canebrake and a rattlesnake crawls out across your sidewalk right here where you’re located, perfect habitat. You walk out and kill it, chances are there won’t be another canebrake here for many years.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, not necessarily, because that rattlesnake is living in a territory that he defends, right? He defends it. And if he’s out of the picture, that leaves an opening in the habitat in the niche for another one to move in and take over.

Ramsey Russell: What about a female?

Terry Vandeventer: Well, again, she occupies part of the niche, she’s living in a certain area, she’s eating a certain amount of food and your property has a carrying capacity. So it’s like when people say, I thought when you said the only good snake, you were saying a king snake. And so people say, well, if I see a king snake, I’m going to catch it and bring it to my property and let it loose because he’ll eat all the bad snakes. Well, king snakes do eat other snakes for sure, but your property already has king snakes and you put another king snake in there, he’s either going to leave or he’s going to get beat up by another king snake or another king snake is going to leave because your property is only going to hold a certain number of them, it’s an equilibrium. But frankly, if we looked out the window of my study here and there was a rattlesnake out on the walk, hey, I’d be happy, I’d be thrilled.

Ramsey Russell: I know you would. Most people would not be.

Terry Vandeventer: No, not at all.

Ramsey Russell: What do you describe as some of the benefits of snakes that people may be unaware of, seriously?

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Now king snakes, everybody loves them. The basis of the only good snake is a dead snake is, I caught about a 4ft king snake when I was a teenager and after he got out of the house one too many times, he couldn’t stay in the house no more. So I just literally let him go in the flower beds. And for months you’d see him out there sunning on the sidewalk, you happen upon him in the wood pile. And one day I’m sitting there after school, I’m sitting there eating my bowl of cocoa puffs, whatever I’m eating, and the neighbor’s children had been playing in the backyard doing something and they ran one way and entered their dad with a hoe. And before I could leave the kitchen table and clear the back door, he don’t chop my king snake to pieces, it was a snake, it had to die.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah. Well, more and more we are removed from nature, not you and me and not your listeners, but think about it, as people in America, more and more were removed from nature. Look at the people that go to Yellowstone National Park and think they can pet a bison because it’s a national park, nothing can hurt you here, the government’s protecting you. And what it is, is they’re removed from nature, they don’t know what nature’s all about. They’re in bustling cities and they’re trucking their kids to school and they’re going to work and more and more every year. Of course with hunting and fishing, there’s concern that there’s fewer hunters and fishermen every year.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Vandeventer: There’s concern. So our nature comes from inane shows on TV.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Vandeventer: From these hosts that come on and wrestle snakes and stuff, that’s what we –

Ramsey Russell: It creates sensational drama.

Terry Vandeventer: Absolutely. Each one trying to do more than the other. So with people more and more removed from nature, there’s less and less understanding of it and appreciation. If you don’t appreciate it, if you don’t even know it exists, you’re certainly not going to protect it.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about some of the benefits of snakes. And I know it because my wife, who is morbidly afraid of snakes has grown tolerant with me, having been around with me and the boys for 30 years, but somehow or other, one day she come in very calmly and told me there was a king snake, I go where? She goes, out in the backyard.

Terry Vandeventer: Good.

Ramsey Russell: And she accepted it because none of us ever been bitten and we live in snake country and she hates moles and mice worse than she hates snakes.

Terry Vandeventer: Does she really?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, anyway, she saw a benefit to having this king snake out in the backyard.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, snakes, certainly rats and mice, absolutely. Snakes eat tremendous numbers of insects and things like that. What does it do for me? What good is it? What does it do for me? That’s an attitude we often have. What it is, is they’re intricate parts of the ecosystem and they may not benefit you directly, but they do eat rats and mice and they do eat insects. And our old friend, the cottonmouth that nobody loves, he’s out there eating dead and diseased fish along the bank, helping keep the environment clean and disease free. But we take venomous snakes and we squeeze their little heads into a vial and we get the venom and from that venom we make anti-venom to save you if you get bit by a snake. And we also use it for all kinds of pharmaceuticals, everything from Alzheimer’s to breast cancer. Copperheads, the venom of southern copperheads, not northern copperheads, not Trans Pecos copperheads, not Osage copperheads from Missouri, Southern copperheads from Mississippi, their venom is being used in the development of a treatment for breast cancer. So the black mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world, Alzheimer’s disease and painkillers. We use them for lots of things that help us for sure. And they do things that we do benefit from their activities. But the main thing is they’re part of the ecosystem and if you were to remove those snakes from the ecosystem, there would be problems, there would be problems out there. When I see a rattlesnake, I look around me in Mississippi, when I see a rattlesnake, I look around me and say, this is a healthy environment. Because rattlesnakes shy away from where people live generally and development and there’s a German term, a long German word that means culture fleers, one who gets away from development and culture, rattlesnakes are considered culture fleers. So if you have a rattlesnake living on your property, if you see a rattlesnake on your property, that’s a barometer, that’s an indicator that you have a healthy environment there. Because rattlesnakes are the first to go. When things start going south, rattlesnakes are the first to go. So I personally find snakes elegant and graceful and they have wonderful colors and I find them to be peaceful animals because I understand them. And my 7 year old grandson, since he was 2 years old has been here at our property. And he and I go on expeditions throughout the forest behind here, we are chock full of cottonmouths. And since he was 3, he could identify one and the first snake we ever found, I looked down and I said, Ben, look and he looked down and he stood up and under his breath he whispered one, two as he took one two steps back. He stood up, whispered one, two, step back, two steps and he knew exactly what to do. And he loves them. Now, I don’t give a wit if old Ben grows up to be a herpetologist. I don’t care if he grows up to work on Wall Street, all I want from him is to understand that there’s other things out there, that there’s nature, there’s the environment, that it’s there.

They’re a part of that world we live in and we love so much

Ramsey Russell: They’re a part of that world we live in and we love so much. And it was a long road for me to grow up and leave a cottonmouth alone, it was deep down in my bone from being a Delta boy. Well, we ain’t got time to talk about some, I want to get in some of the venomous snakes around the world. Because I know that in your experience you’ve dealt with a lot of venomous snakes from around the world, I’m sitting here looking, I believe that’s a gaboon viper.

Terry Vandeventer: Yeah, it sure is.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I guess you’ve handled them before.

Terry Vandeventer: That’s what brought me to Mississippi, actually.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Terry Vandeventer: We did a surgical procedure on one, it was published, and the director of the zoo read the publication and contacted me and offered me a job. So, yeah, I’ve dealt with, I have some zoo background, I was enthusiastic kid. Back in the day, our vacation was eating Vienna sausages and hopping in an old Volkswagen and going to the Everglades or going to Arizona to hunt rattlers and stuff. But I’m still an academic and I’m still a hobbyist and I keep a few snakes for pets and for various reasons too. Snakes pass through my hands for photographs, for measurements. If I find an old chicken snake out here in the yard and it’s obvious she has eggs in her, I’ll bring her in, put her in a cage, let her lay her eggs, I’ll measure them and count them and let them hatch, I’ll measure the babies, I’ll write on the calendar and that’s all recorded. And meanwhile, she’s out there eating squirrels. And then I let her babies go. And so I do work for the – I’m a field associate in herpetology with the State Natural Science Museum. So, over the years I’ve done contract work with them and written articles for them, forum and magazine articles for the department, and I did a podcast the other day for Wildlife Fisheries & Parks. And I’m busy in education and this book where we just finished up that’ll be out one year from August. And it’s Mississippi Snakes, their identification, natural history and influence on the culture of the Magnolia State. So it’s going to cover everything.

Ramsey Russell: I look forward to seeing that.

Terry Vandeventer: Do snakes really whip you with their tails? Well, by the book and you’ll find out.

Ramsey Russell: Last question, I’m going to ask you about, I won’t put you on spot but you’re a snake enthusiast, you’re a snake advocate, but you’ve been bit.

Terry Vandeventer: I’ve been bitten, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’m sure you’ve been bitten by non-venomous, but how many times you ever been bitten by a venomous snakes?

Terry Vandeventer: 3 times. And in 72 years every time was my error, it was my error, the snake didn’t attack me or anything. The last time I was a bitten that took place when I was at the Jackson Zoo and it’s pretty, all snake bites are serious, but it was pretty serious bite. I wasn’t for fear of dying or anything like that. I was unfortunately treated, I would say incorrectly by the doctor, he’s no longer around so I can say that. But he chose a surgical approach rather than antivenin and it caused a 25 day hospital stay when I should have been out in a couple days.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of snake was it?

Terry Vandeventer: It was a western diamondback rattlesnake. It was a feeding situation where two snakes in the same cage and I guess they mistook me for a rat, but it was a serious bite. But people, they crash their bicycles or their motorcycles, they get back on again, it’s same with me. I don’t downplay it, if anything it’s a bit embarrassing.

Ramsey Russell: But what would you say the most lethal – you’re not downplaying it, you take all snake bites seriously. What would be a snake bite, what species of snake worldwide would you be most worried about?

Terry Vandeventer: Worldwide?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Vandeventer: Well, I would not want to be locked up in a phone booth with a black mamba.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Black mambas don’t chase people, every safari books ever been written talks about, no, they don’t

Terry Vandeventer: Black mambas don’t chase people, every safari books ever been written talks about, no, they don’t. But most mamba bites happen inside huts, inside people’s houses where they enter at night.

Ramsey Russell: So that’s a bad son of a gun.

Terry Vandeventer: And you can be bitten several times and if you don’t get anti-venom, you will die. It’s considered 100% fatal without anti-venom. But with anti-venom most people do survive. You up in the Delta, you grew up in the Delta, have you ever heard of sweep in the yard? Sweep in the dirt?

Ramsey Russell: No.

Terry Vandeventer: The African Americans do it up there in their little sharecropper houses. Grandma comes out at night, she sweeps to the broom, sweeps all the dirt all around the house. Why is she doing that? Because back in Africa, generations ago, that’s what they did to see who came around during the night.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darn.

Terry Vandeventer: Did a lion come through? Well, there’s the tracks.

Ramsey Russell: Well, it’s funny you say that, and I didn’t know what the origins that was, but I have been to parts of world Guatemala where they kept it swept and cleaned all around the house.

Terry Vandeventer: Did they see a snake track entering the hut? If it’s in there, we want to know about it. So it’s again, one of those cultural things.

Ramsey Russell: Terry, I appreciate the time, thank you very much. We’ve got to wrap this up. I’m looking forward to go seeing some of your pets, take a few videos and get a little education. But thank you for very much for your time coming on here today.

Terry Vandeventer: Anytime.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, you all know the drill, leave a comment below. I’m going to invite you all, if you got any snake stories, I want to hear them. Shoot me an inbox on social media or email, text, you all know the drill, just contact me, I want to hear your snake stories. Thank you all for listening this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, watch where you step. See you next time.

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