http://www.statesman.com/sports/content/sports/stories/outdoors/2009/08/02//0802legcol.html



Texas: land of cattle, wide open spaces, giant snakes

Friday, July 31, 2009



I love Texas. I could exist other places, but I couldn't call it living, wouldn't try.



Our state is hot and miserable dry and swampy. You sweat and steam and freeze and get blown around by hurricanes, sometimes in the same week.



Mosquitos drink your blood, feral hogs tromp down our crops and poison ivy, lord'll make you itch.



But no place, and I mean no other place in the world, can be as unashamedly, perfectly embracing of the country side of life as can Texas.



I refer — in case you haven't seen it — to the picture speeding around the Internet right now of Manor Police Chief Robert Snyder holding up a big, old, so dead his head's not there anymore western diamondback rattlesnake.



It's real. Snyder killed it. The police department over there is taking calls from all over the country about it. Everybody is fascinated by it, especially since the newly dead snake in the picture has a knot in his belly the size of a poodle.



Back when I was a kid (Don't you love hearing a sentence start that way?), this snake would have been thrown into the back of somebody's pickup and driven down to the town square for people to look at. They would have come out of the courthouse — even the old guys, the Khaki Mafia, the ones that sit and spit and cuss politics and the weather on the benches outside — and down from the barber shop and over from the title company.



They would stand around and say things like, "Yeah, he's a big 'un," and, "Snake like that'd break your leg when he bit ya." One of them would invariably tell the story about how a big rattler can charm a squirrel or a bird and how he saw it done and how it made him sick to watch, just sick, and, "I don't wanna talk about it no more."



After the ice cream truck came around and broke up the gathering, the guy who killed the snake might take it home to show his kids or even stash it on the floorboard of his brother-in-law's pickup. Then he and his best buddy would hide behind the garage and watch the brother-in-law scream and dance and walk up to the edge of a heart attack.



But this is 2009 and the age of super electronics. It's faster to send pictures by email than it is to haul a dead reptile by pickup, and though it's not nearly as much fun, so many more folks can see it and talk about how this snake was H-U-G-E and could break your leg if he bit you. And besides, there's no place to park at the courthouse these days.



So there's the picture of Snyder straining to hold up the dead rattler, it's head shredded by a shotgun blast. I couldn't quite make out the "City of x.x.dflsdj" on his uniform patch, so I called over to the Manor PD to check and make certain this wasn't another Internet giant-snake hoax. I got Sgt. Ryan Phipps on my first pass.



"I took those photos," Phipps said, "with my iPhone. It was a pretty good-sized snake."



Phipps said a Manor resident first asked Travis County deputies to come to her house to handle the big snake, which she found in her yard. The rattler, I'm sure, was just trying to sleep off his recent meal and really wasn't much danger to anyone in that over-fed state, but you can't have rattlesnakes around kids, and so this one had to go.



"We've been getting lots of calls about snakes this summer, and one man came to the PD who'd just been bitten," Phipps said. Drought, which is forcing snakes to move more in search of water and prey, and development in the area are bringing people into contact with more snakes, he said.



"When we got there, he'd obviously just eaten, and he wasn't doing much," Phipps said. "Chief Snyder shot him with his .410 shotgun." That explains the shredded head in the photo. Then Snyder posed for the photo, holding the snake out toward the camera.



Some of the Internet chatter about the snake said that it was a six-footer, which would be a really big Hill Country rattler. Phipps said it was a big snake but that nobody actually measured it, so there's no way to know exactly how large it was. But it did have 13 rattles.



Everybody — looking over into a pickup bed or downloading an Internet photo — has to know what the bulge was in the snake's belly. "People wanted to know because they were worried about their pets disappearing," Phipps said.



The officers took the snake away and then sliced it open. Jackrabbit.



God bless Texas.

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