Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Snakes Alive

So as I took the tarp off the earth oven last week, here's what I saw:


That's a bull snake, a relatively small one, about the size of a large garter snake. Bull snakes can exceed six feet in length.

Anyone have a good recipe for barbecue snake?

This visitor is still alive, slipped into a hole in the oven base and slithered away. Seriously, though, does anyone know if bull snakes are edible?

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

6 comments:

  1. Yikes! And yet, what a handsome snake. How could you be thinking about eating the poor fellow? I realize that he practically placed himself inside your oven, but he was likely just thinking how kind it was of you to build him a house!

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  2. Odds are high that I would have shit myself if that happened to me...

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  3. I'd ask Camera Trap Codger or Steve Bodio, but I'm pretty sure all snakes are edible.

    Good rat and mouse catcher to have around your place!

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  4. Sharon, I wouldn't eat that snake--it's much too small. Also, after an incident involving a live snake one of my students brought me as a gift when I was teaching in China, the Quentin Taratino-esque scene that ensued from the student's attempts, with sizable audience, to dispatch the snake in my apartment's bathroom, I do not take lightly the potentially gruesome difficulties of snake slaughter. But our Wisconsin neighbors just down the hill mentioned that they've encountered quite a lot of bull snakes down their way, so I just wondered, for future reference, about general snake edibility.

    Teddy, had it been a full-grown bull snake, I might have had the same reaction....

    mdmnm, thanks for the resources, I may ask their opinion. As the oven is near our bird feeders, which attract plenty of mice and voles for fallen seed, I imagine our oven snake is eating pretty well.

    Update: I've found the snake under the oven tarp twice now. I guess it's found a home....

    Cheers, all~ Brett

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  5. Don' t believe your pictured snake is a Bull Snake, but instead, an Eastern Fox Snake. Color pattern in too uniform and head not right shape for a Bull Snake. I have breed several Bull and Fox snakes over the years - coloration and pattern is close, sort of, and Bulls are much bigger and more aggressive.

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  6. That's a FOX snake. Not a bull snake.

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