Reeder Custom Guns - Leroy Brown, the Black Ratsnake!

Roman got a summer job helping the maintenance crew here at the Water Utility, his first pay-check job. Yesterday following Jake around doing the last walk-around checks Roman was lead. They stepped into the Chlorine Blg. room and Roman was promptly hit on the back of the Blue Jeans by a snake strike. The report was Roman simply said "Hey, what?" Jake almost laid an egg. Roman identified the snake he just stepped on as a common Ratsnake or Chicken snake, as we call them around here. Shiny black, white belly, long oval head with round pupils. He then picked it up and brought to my office and put it in the old Hognose cage.

Jake is still having the heebie-jeebies and needs some time to recompose. Claimed Roman saved his life by taking point. Said if the snake had struck him all we could have done was call the Coroner. Jake knows all snakes in AR fall into two categories, "Cottonmouths and Copperheads". That Ratsnake grouped with the former and needed to die! All snakes in fact! We had a good laugh.

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I will admit it seems to be the most surly and angry one I've encountered, a good 4'+ long. He's hard to measure with the vicious snapping and all. It will rise up in an aggressive poise with it's mouth open menacingly and tail rattling. He is ready and more than willing to bite anything that gets within about 18". We are keeping him for study for a couple days. Maybe feeding him a Toad to help give him a good send off for later release. They eat other snakes too much like a Kingsnake. But it just goes to show that all critters are individuals and the "Books" don't know or teach everything. You have to live and learn yourself. The snake is harmless but could make you hurt yourself trying to get away. It's good to learn yourself and teach your kids about all animals. I think it makes for a better outdoors-man and hunting ambassador.

Now you got that song stuck in your head. ....baddest snake in the whole damn town....

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Certain times of the year most snakes will become aggressive to the point of even chasing you. Used to thing it was due to 'breeding' and/or shedding, as they sometimes don't see as well when shedding the old skin. I'm with Jake, leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, act aggressive and you're a dead snake.

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Tennessee, the transmitter room was right next to the control room with a big almost full wall glass window between us and the transmitter. Back then the D.J. on the air had to take meter readings every 30 minutes to make sure the transmitter was broadcasting on a specific frequency and not spreading out onto another station's frequency. It was not at all uncommon to walk thru the door into the transmitter room and see a big snake coiled up there. The transmitter emitted a hum that we couldn't hear but it was like the song of the siren to mice and such and that brought in the snakes. The back door of the station opened up into a big field so all kinds of critters were known to come in as we kept the back door open all the time. The transmitter put out 1000 watts on AM and 50,000 watts on FM so it got quite hot in that room, thus the open door to let a breeze in.

We had one D.J. that was deathly afraid of snakes. I had the morning show and got off at 10AM. The snake hater came on at 10 and went til 2 PM. I had a speaker in my office the stayed on all the time. Every once in a while I would hear the 21 minute version of Inna Gadda Da Vida by Iron Butterfly or one of the 15 minute versions of a Cream song. Those were not songs we normally played at midday so I would know something was up. I would walk into the control room and the guy on the air would be out in the front office looking thru the glass into the control room and I knew there was a snake somewhere in either the control room or the transmitter room. He wouldn't come back in until he saw me take the snake out and pitch it in the field. Some folks just don't like snakes at all.

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Leroy Brown, the Black Ratsnake!

Rat snake

Amen to that !!

back a hundred years ago when I was still in radio in