Thursday, May 24, 2007

Four seasons: summer, winter, road construction, snakebite

Early Trends May Point to Record Snakebite Season
MELVILLE, N.Y., May 23, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Altana Inc., a member of the Nycomed group, announces the start of the summer season with a warning that the 2007 snakebite season is already a busy one. The frequency of snakebites increases during the summer holidays because that is the time that snakes and people are most active. The number of bites in any given season depends on a variety of factors including geography, rainfall and temperature. Many experts believe that increasing development (for living and recreation) into natural snake habitats is a significant factor in the increased number of bites.

Crikey, I'm no Steve Irwin, but I have had a couple of run ins with rattlers. We were on Spring Break at North Padre Island in Corpus Christi TX. There were 6 of us, and we were camping in the dunes. At night we would play hide and seek, it didn't seem childish while intoxicated; anyway, we'd be diving around and running through the brush without a second thought. Near the end of the week, one of the guys went out to do his #2 duty, and suddenly he's yelling at us to come quick. There's a rattlesnake right in our dumping grounds. We were rather shocked to learn from one of the locals that there's so many of them that people sat in their yards with 22's and shot them all the time. We didn't play out in the dunes that night.

The next year there were 16 of us who went down in an old school bus that we converted into a camper for some guy, he let us use it for the trip. The first day we were setting up camp and a rattler came right into our area. Some guys were rather perturbed with the thought of a rattler making itself cozy in our camp, so they ended up killing it with an empty 8-gallon keg. I've often wondered if there has ever been another case of a rattler getting killed by a beer keg. More from the story:

CroFab(r) Crotalidae Polyvalent Immune Fab (Ovine) is the only widely available antivenom for North American crotalid snakebite envenomations in the United States.

And that's a good piece of knowledge to have for you campers out there. (I'll see if I can find a translation somewhere)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

empty keggers don't kill snakes......people (drunk people) wielding empty keggers kill snakes.

bowler buddy Dave

kingdavid said...

Oh, that is good Dave. I love it.