Want healthy fishing and hunting grounds? Then you want snakes!
Growing up as a child in South Louisiana, my dad taught me that if I decided to take an animal’s life, I better plan to eat it, because every native animal plays an integral role in our ecosystems. This is a lesson I’ve passed on to my own two boys.
I would often post pictures and videos on social media of our family interacting with snakes, so people began sending me photos for identification. Unfortunately, the snakes had almost always already been killed. In 2017, I created Louisiana Snake ID on Facebook as a resource for quick identifications, education and snake relocations. The goal was simply to get more pictures of snakes that were still alive.
We now have over 53,000 followers on social media, and our family has gone full-time snake education. We travel the state doing educational shows to help people overcome their fears and stop killing these extremely misunderstood, yet very beneficial animals.
One of the most essential parts of healthy hunting and fishing grounds are snakes, so we try really hard to get our message across to people who love outdoor activities. After all, they are the ones most likely to come across them.
Cottonmouth water moccasins
Let’s start with the most misunderstood and villainized snake, the venomous cottonmouth water moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus). Most crazy or scary snake stories involve a cottonmouth, or a snake someone misidentified as one. Their defensive actions get taken as aggression, making their “reputation” the stuff of folklore. Hollywood perpetuates this fear with infamous fictional scenes such as the one in the movie “Lonesome Dove,” where a boy in a river is swarmed by countless cottonmouths, then bitten and drowned to death.
Contrary to popular belief, cottonmouth water moccasins DO NOT chase people, they NEVER want to bite people, and if a bite occurs, they are very, very rarely fatal. In the past 40+ years, despite thousands of bites, a total of three people have died from a cottonmouth bite in the United States, and there are zero recorded deaths in Louisiana.
So why would we want any snakes, venomous or non-venomous, in areas where we hunt or fish?
All of our natural predators play a vital role in their ecosystems. Snakes quickly learn that people leave behind injured or dead fish and bait while fishing, so it’s a common misinterpreted action of snakes that eat fish when they come towards us for a better look.
Garbage disposals
Cottonmouths are essentially helpful garbage disposals. Much like a catfish, they’ll eat just about anything, including injured or dead animals, which helps prevent decaying animals from contaminating water sources and causing a fish kill. They don’t have exceptional vision, so if they see movement on a bank or in a boat, they’ll come closer. By the time they realize they’ve approached a predator, it’s too late to get away, so as a defensive mechanism moccasins will often open their mouths and watersnakes will flatten their bodies and heads. They are trying to look bigger or scary in hopes that you will leave them alone.
If you’ve ever been to a park or pond where the ducks came towards you to see if you had bread, this is the same behavior; a curious and hungry animal coming closer to see if they can get an easy meal. Snakes don’t get the same benefit of the doubt as the cute little ducks that are actually more likely to bite you.
On another note, if you’ve ever had a snake fall in your boat, it was almost definitely a harmless watersnake. It’s not impossible for a venomous snake to be in a tree, but it’s very uncommon.
Although they have a different diet, both copperheads and rattlesnakes are also very helpful for these areas, yet they’re also often killed by hunters. Snakes don’t spread diseases to humans, but fleas and ticks do, along with the very wildlife that we love to hunt for meat, and rodents cause both structural and electrical damage to camps, homes and vehicles, including ATVs.
Pest control
The University of Maryland performed a study that found a single timber rattlesnake can eliminate 2,500-4,500 ticks alone per year with their diet of at least 100 rodents annually. Similarly, our corn snakes and rat snakes provide the same service. Killing these natural rodent-eating machines only helps those disease-spreading rodents to multiply at an exponential rate, and allow fleas and ticks to thrive, while snakes can take out all three in one fell swoop just by eating their dinner.
The best way to ensure healthy hunting and fishing habitats is to just leave snakes to do what they do. They are our natural, chemical and poison free pest control. Not only does nature provide for us, it’s also here to protect us.
Join our Facebook page and visit our website www.louisianasnakeid.com to learn more about these amazing creatures.
