Feeding the Snake

The house I've been staying in this summer in is actually one of the old cabins built by the CCC – although it’s got electricity, and plumbing, and – thank goodness! – air conditioning. It’s a duplex, with two bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom  on each side, and since there was only one other seasonal using it, we each had a side to ourself – with the understanding that someone else might get moved in at any time, and we would have to double up. It was a pretty good accommodation.

Unfortunately it also had a high cricket population. Every night I would come in and when I turned on the light there would be crickets everywhere! I started catching them and putting them in an old orange juice bottle, and bringing them in to the Naturalist Office to feed to the fish and the frogs. Apparently I really put a dent in the population, because now I only see one every once in a while.

                        

Then there was a mouse. And it kept raiding the mousetrap without getting caught. Steve gave me a “tin cat”, a live trap, and that did it. He told me to bring whatever I caught in to the office, and we would feed it to one of the snakes.

WARNING: snake pictures below the cut!

We brought one of the two copperhead cages outside onto the porch, so it would be able to warm up after being in the AC, which we have to leave on to keep the aquarium from overheating. Then Steve unlocked the cage and we tipped the mouse in.

It took a while for anything to happen, because the snake was still moving pretty slow, and the mouse was moving very fast. Every time the snake started to figure out where the mouse was, it was already gone!

Steve even tried shooting rubber bands into the cage to stun the mouse, but his aim wasn’t good enough. The mouse managed to avoid the snake for quite a while.

Eventually the copperhead got a bite in – not enough to kill it, but enough to start slowing it down. This happened a couple of times. Finally it got one good bite, and the mouse dropped.

PSA: Copperhead bites are painful but relatively safe – if it can barely kill a mouse, what’s it going to do to a human? People are only likely to die if they have a heart attack because they just got bit by a copperhead… or the rare case where a person died because he had an allergic reaction to the venom. Apparently if you go to the emergency room and tell them you were bitten by a copperhead, they are just as likely not to give you any antivenin, because you would have a worse reaction from that than you would from the original bite! That said, if you do get bitten by a copperhead – go to the emergency room anyway, just in case!

Copperheads are also fairly tolerant – they will probably bite you if you step on them, but you really have to provoke them. They’re not going to “shoot on sight” – and if they do they might not even release any venom. Why waste it on scaring off some big useless animal when it will be put to better use killing that mouse for dinner?

I got to see the final moments of the battle, but had to leave as the snake was preparing to swallow its prey.

When I got back later, there was a very big lump in the middle of the snake.

You may be interested to notice that the copperhead had shed recently, but had a bad shed – a lot of the old skin got left behind, which is why it looks a little scruffy in this photo.

So went the circle of life! And I haven’t had a mouse in my cabin again, that I could tell.