Living on the river I bet you see lots of cottonmouths. I really don’t like them.
Yep. We’ve seen cottonmouths, only not nearly as many as rattlesnakes. Too many of the rattlers have been killed off; now we’re left with cottonmouths & copperheads, the silent ones. I think it’s bad when things get out of balance. So far, we seem to get more harmless snakes in the garden. - When my dad was a kid; he & his sisters & brothers were walking single file in their farmyard. Daddy & the bigger kids walked past a certain point. The little ones were trailing along behind. A big old cottonmouth came crawling out, the kids started screaming. Daddy grabbed up a big old rock, circled back around & clobbered the h-e-double hockey sticks out of that snake & killed it. (It was just one of the experiences that prepared him to face the Nazis during WWII.) He also had to hunt wild game to help put food on the table for his family & was a pretty good shot.