This time of year a lot of us turn our attention to hunting and camping. When you go hunting in addition to the regular safety rules like make sure of your target before you pull the trigger, always keep the muzzle of your gun pointed away from others and always treat all guns as if they are loaded here in this part of the country we have pests to watch out for almost year round.
Yes, I'm talking about bugs and snakes, in particular. I've seen snakes on days when you would swear it was way to cold to be seeing them. One of my first experiences with snakes during cold weather happened one year while duck hunting on Thanksgiving Day.
Several years ago while walking down a logging road to a lake where we were going to duck hunt one morning we came across a water moccasin about three and a half feet long. He was lying near a mud hole in the road, there was water in the mud hole, but the unusual thing was there was ice on the water. The snake couldn't move very fast, but several of us got a chance to see him. I have always figured the afternoon before the temperature was about seventy degrees and one of those fast moving cold fronts came through dropping the temperature about forty degrees in just a few hours and he got caught out in it.
The second time I was getting out of the truck at the camp when one of the people there pointed and started to yell snake. It was to late as he struck at me and got his fangs hung up in my blue jeans, the temperature at the time was in the low forties and I was surprised to see a active snake at that time.
But snakes aren't the only thing we have to look out for during this time of year. After a week long camping trip during the week of Thanksgiving not too many years ago we were getting ready to go home. The weather and hunting and fishing had been good during the week, with some cool days and cold nights and a few warmer days.
I was hooking up the safety chains to the truck and when I stood up I slightly bumped the back of my shoulder on the corner of the truck. I felt a sharp pain where I had bumped my shoulder and thought that I might have bumped some kind of a sharp object sticking out of the back of the truck. The weather was cool and I was wearing a light jacket, I pulled it off and pulled up the shirt I was wearing and ask one of the men camping with us if I had stuck something in my shoulder. He told me, “no, but you have a tick back there about the size of a grape.”
I have read that the bite of a Black widow spider can be bad or not so bad, as many as 2,000 people are bitten by these spiders each year and only a few actually need medical treatment. My first experience with bugs during cool or cold weather was with a black widow spider.
We were camping during a cold spell and gathering firewood to have a good fire on a cold night. I was carrying a piece of firewood back to the camp when I felt a stinging on my side. I threw the wood down and pulled up my shirt and there was a black widow spider on my side. One of the local doctors was along on this trip, he came over and looked at the bite and said, “boy, that little bit of venom not going to hurt you through that much fat.” Other than a little bit of an itch it never bothered me.
So, even when fall finally gets here sometime this winter and our weather does cool down, you might still want to keep an eye out for snakes and bugs that could cause you some pain.
The Alger Sullivan Historical Society meets at 6 PM on the third Tuesday of the month at the Leach House Museum at Fourth and Jefferson, please join us.
