STATESBORO HERALD (Georgia) 25 March 04 Screven snake hunters bag big rattlesnake - Two residents capture 8-pounder at Roundup (Logan Thomas)
Hanging on the wall beside Tommy Sheppard’s desk is a picture of an armadillo drinking out of a can and another of himself holding a rattlesnake thicker than the barrel of a baseball bat. And much longer.
“Believe it or not,” he said with a grin, “the picture of the snake gets the most eyes when people walk in here.”
From a rattlesnake’s habitat to the way they hunt their prey, Sheppard knows his snakes.
And his experience helped Sheppard and his friend, Glenn Thompson, capture the largest rattlesnake at the 2004 Rattlesnake Roundup in Evans County earlier this month. The award earned the two a cash prize and a trophy.
“This snake weighed about eight pounds and was approximately six feet long,” said Thompson who has hunted snakes with Sheppard for more than a decade. “We don’t go every year, but we’ve always had no trouble capturing big snakes.”
Thompson said their snake-hunting days began when they would continue seeing snakes while they were hunting deer.
“When we both had children,” he said, “we started thinking of the safety factor and starting killing more and more. The first time we went out looking for snakes, I think we probably ran into 30 big snakes.”
When Sheppard first moved into his Screven County home 25 years ago, he said it was rattlesnake country.
“Every summer,” he said, “I would kill about two or three. In the winter, we had to worry about not stepping on them. That’s what got me started (hunting snakes). Now we capture about 35-45 snakes each year.”
According to Sheppard, gopher tortoises burrow large holes in the ground where rattlesnakes hibernate during the winter. He said the snake would then coil and await its prey to step within about a foot before striking.
“Sometimes you can find them outside of the hole,” he said. “It’s easier to hunt them that way but it’s a little more on your nerves. Other times, they’re down in the hole.”
To determine if the snake’s down the hole, Sheppard said he places a pipe into the ground to listen.
“You can hear that rattler just fine,” he said. “You’d be surprised how well you can hear them.”
Sheppard said he has had what he calls some “real close encounters” with snakes.
“I was deer hunting in the afternoon and I forgot my flashlight,” he said. “When the sun started to go down, I decided it was time to go back before it got dark … the forest was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. And then I heard the rattle and it sounded like it could have been all the snakes in the world. It was so loud it sounded like it was everywhere and like there was a boom box making the noise over my head.”
Sheppard said he jumped into the air and “ran about 30-40 yards.”
“When I stopped,” he said, “I could still hear them. There’s nothing in the world that sounds quite like that. That was the closest I ever was to a bite.”
Contrary to what one might believe, Sheppard said the larger rattlesnakes are “too common.” But he said they are not as dangerous as the smaller snakes.
“The bigger snakes know what they’re doing,” he said. “They’ve been around long enough to know what to bite and what not to bite. He just wants to scare you away. The little snakes are actually more aggressive.”
Sheppard’s history with rattlesnakes goes back to when he was young. He said there were always tall tales about rattlesnakes.
“I remember people used to say the dust from a rattler would blind you,” he said. “There were always tales going around about the snakes.”
However, Sheppard said the danger from rattlesnakes was all too real.
“Every summer when I was young,” he said, “two or three field hands would get bit by a rattlesnake. We’d hear quite a bit of tales, but that was because more people were working out in the fields back then.”
Despite any danger there might be, Thompson said he loves getting together to go snake hunting.
“It’s really a camaraderie thing,” he said. “We all get together and people like to see how it’s done.”
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Screven snake hunters bag big rattlesnake
