DON'T FORGET YOUR SNAKE GUARDS!

Picture of a black bear
 I got on my trail cam.

One of my hobbies I guess you could say is traveling to state parks in Pennsylvania.  I enjoy the outdoors I like hiking, fishing, and hunting, basically anything that deals with being outside is my thing to do.   If you haven’t been to or heard of Tuscarora State Forest the first thing I suggest you do before you go hiking there in the summer time is to buy some snake guards.  Tuscarora State Forest has a lot of animals there including but not limited to deer, bears, foxes, coyotes, and porcupines all of which I have personally seen there. 

I’m not scared of the animals I can see that can do harm to me like a bear because then I can avoid it I’m more afraid of the ones I can’t see as in this story it’s pretty hard to see a timber rattlesnake.  I am a hunter and one cool device I use is a trail camera that is a camera with a motion detector in which it will snap a picture when something moves in front of it.  I had one of these set up in an area deer like to travel unknowingly something else like to live in that area too.  I was walking out to get my camera with my sister and wife when after crossing a log I noticed a snake lying on the trail in front of me about seven feet away.  I noticed it was a rattlesnake I told my wife and sister to watch it and I would go around it and get my camera.  I didn’t want to run into it on the way back.  The rattlesnake blended in with the ground perfectly with its striped pattern.  As I walked around it my wife asked me “do rattle snakes travel in packs” I laughed and said no.  I was only about four feet away from the snake on the other side of it now when I went to go to take another step toward where my camera was another rattlesnake was coiled up about two feet away from me. 

Picture of the rattlesnake coiled up.

          I thought rattlesnakes would rattle when something was near them but apparently not because neither of these ones rattled at all.  I consider myself lucky after seeing the second one and taking a bunch of pictures of them we headed back to my truck and I decided I would get my camera some other time. 

Blurry picture I took of the rattlesnakes coil.

          Rattlesnakes will tend to stay in open wooden areas and fields in the summer and then later when closer to fall will head to rocky areas to den for the winter.  Timber rattlesnakes range from as far north as new England to as far west as Texas.  They are closely related to the pit viper and are cousins to the more lethal of the two species the eastern and western diamondback rattlesnakes.  Timber rattle snakes are protected in most states and their numbers are said to be dwindling.   I guess I was not only lucky to have not been bitten by one of them but to actually see them at all.  

  Just a follow up on the receiving of the camera situation two days later I went back to go get my camera with my dad.  When we got to the spot where the rattlesnakes were the smaller one of the two was still there after some poking with a stick it slithered off  the trail and I finally got my camera, and that time we had snake guarders on.