Awesome Encounter

[mklong40]

Woke up this morning and helped a buddy get a rifle sighted in. Also sat down and watched some deer comb the hills before the rain moved in. So I am sitting down on my butt glassing and I hear some noise in the grass to my right. A few minutes later a pack rat comes blowing out right in front of me. The pack rat is hurting. Jerking all over sporadically, can tell its hurting. It manages to make its way about 6 feet up the opposite bank. About 5 minutes later a 3' black-tailed rattler comes out where the rat first was. It has no clue I'm 4 feet away and tracks this rat. It goes straight to it and it knows this rat it still alive. The snake moves in and drills the rat with a bite. Meanwhile I am recording all of this sitting 4 feet away from the action. The snake chills and waits about 15 minutes until the rat finally dies. The snake gulps the thing right in front me. Totally awesome.

 

My boys have a couple of ball pythons and we normally catch a few kings throughout the year but I have never seen a snake move in a make a kill in the wild. I felt like I was on national geographic. Not to mention, it was a less common rattler.....here are some pics.

 

[bonecollector]

Pretty cool, but I dont think Inwould of sat 4 ft away from that rattler.

[CouesWhitetail]

Wow, that is awesome! I had a similar experience with a gopher snake eating a rat. I heard noise in the grass and went to investigate and saw the snake already squashing the rat. Cool stuff!

[huntjunkie]

Dang!!! That's awesome!

[Jcubed]

Sweet! I'm sure the rattler had dinner on his mind

[gotcoues]

Very cool! I've kept rattlesnakes in captivity. Watching them bite/inject venom into there prey and then wait til the prey dies so they can begin their meal never got old. Snakes in general are a favorite animal of mine for sure.

[mklong40]

I normally keep quite the distance from these guys, and loving to upland hunt with my GSP's, these guys usually get the loud end of a shotgun. However, this was too cool to not watch and being a little bit more of less than normal type you see around, I let this was slither away for another day. Really cool to see this thing track the rat and nail it in the wild.

[Pine Donkey]

Very cool show you got to watch.

[Coach]

That is awesome! So glad you could share the experience and the snake got to go on doing what it does naturally.

 

Here's a particularly large blacktail ( often mid-identified as timber rattler) we saw on the black about a month ago. He has some amazing coloring.

 

 

 

 

[Pixman]

Wow that is crazy, thanks for sharing. My wife and I were hiking and ran into a Western that had just caught a rabbit. We watched while it was devouring it and warned few hikers to watch their step.

 

 

 

[wildwoody]

cool,cool,cool

[CouesWhitetail]

It's amazing those snakes can swallow such big prey!

[Jimmer Negamanee]

Awesome encounters! Glad you all were able to get pictures! Thanks for posting.

[couesmagnet]

That is awesome! So glad you could share the experience and the snake got to go on doing what it does naturally.

 

Here's a particularly large blacktail ( often mid-identified as timber rattler) we saw on the black about a month ago. He has some amazing coloring.

 

snake.jpg

 

snake2.jpg

I really like the big arizona black version of the rattlesnakes. That is a beautiful specimen. A friend of mine got one near forest lakes 2 years ago that measured out at a little over 5 feet with several witnesses there.

[Snapshot]

SNAKES