Idyllic Chick

I saw another coral snake!

I wasn't blogging back in March 2006 when Chris and I first moved into the Satellite of Love, so you didn't get to hear about my first encounter with the wildlife in the suburban country. Just two weeks after we moved in I was walking to my car in the morning, and a coral snake was all laid out on our sidewalk. As I approached him, he just scooted right along in front of me. All I could think was, 'Red on yella, kill a fella... Red on yella, kill a fella...' I knew it was no king snake, and I knew that corals are very, very poisonous. I was scared half to death! I took a couple of crappy photos with my camera, just to prove to others that I was not camping in the crazy tent.

After verifying with my serpent-loving boss that it was indeed a coral snake, I found that while their venom is quite dangerous, it is pretty hard for a coral snake to actually get his venom into a human. Apparently they are 'chewers'. They have to get ahold of you and gnaw on you for a bit to fill you up with their vile liquid of death. Seeing as how their mouths and teeth are pretty small, it's hard for them to get the bite on a big thing like me. This is not to say that my dogs wouldn't be dead in a heartbeat if they got into a scuffle with a coral snake, but these snakes are also timid creatures, who would really just rather be left alone.

So today when C&I were getting out of the truck after a long day of yarn-hauling, I wasn't nearly as frightened to see a coral snake on the sidewalk as I was that first time. This one was shorter than the one I saw last year, and his tiny mouth *might* make it around my pinkie toe, should it be available to him. He crawled through the leaves and under the trailer, just like the one that I saw last year did. Happy little snake. I just won't be poking around under our house anytime soon!