Swamp struck!
| As we made our approach the rain
increased and night fell. We were unable to see anything that was not in the
headlights.
As we crested the hill and made our way down we
immediately saw a very large and very beautiful black rat snake. It was also
very dead as it had been run over. I have yet to see it’s equal. It was very
black and had white scales between the blotches. It was the most
“high-contrast” cow sucker that I had and still have ever seen. |
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Once back in the car we went perhaps 60
feet and noticed a young cottonmouth crossing the road. We all jumped out
and began to photograph it. The Young brothers were anxious to move on, but
we were not so sure we would see anymore snakes and wanted to photograph
what we had found.
They soon convinced us to get back in the car and we were on our way. We did not go far though. As we got to the bottom of the hill we saw a large female cottonmouth, and then another, and then another! |
While Phil and Dwight were taking turns photographing and wrangling a large female cottonmouth that was obviously gravid I took my flashlight and walked down the road a bit. What lay before me was like a scene out of a time that I thought had come and gone. The road was covered with cottonmouths crossing and apparently even giving birth! There were fresh babies everywhere. I soon discovered one feeding on a road killed grey tree frog! When I returned and told the guys of the situation Dwight suggested we proceed on foot. |
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As we parked the car the first horror of the night reared its ugly head. A large coal truck passed down the road. We had to get out of the way and as we made our way up the road we soon found a number of dead trap jaws…one of them gravid and about to give birth. This made us all upset, and then we noticed headlights in the distance. We were soon running up the road using our hooks to help the snakes across the road so they would not be smashed. After some time the rain died down and the flurry of activity seemed to pass. |
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We then split up and road cruised in teams. John and I soon found a garter snake that had just been run over and was still twitching. It was a handsome garter snake. When we met back up it turned out that Phil, Dwight, and Steve had found a nice copperhead. Sadly, it too had been run over! We also found a bunch of cricket frogs, grey tree
frogs, bull frogs, green frogs, southern leopard frogs, and marbled
salamanders.. A few more
cottonmouth were discovered and photographed, but it was getting late and
Phil and I had a long drive ahead of us. |
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We said our goodbyes and began the drive out of the swamp and home. We had not been in my truck for ten seconds before the magnitude of what had happened began to sink in. We had seen around 50 cottonmouth in the span of three hours. They had been so thick that we had been forced to abandon the car so we would not run over them. The evening’s events had met and even far surpassed those that Kauffield and Ditmars had written about and that we were very familiar with. As we made our way east on the Western Kentucky Parkway we
came to the conclusion that the Golden Age of snake hunting was now, and not 50
or 100 years ago. We also agreed that we had to return some time during daylight
hours to see what the habitat looked like. This experience set a fire in us to
learn more about this special place and its inhabitants that survives in us to
this day. |
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