Steven A. Ellis
Kennesaw, GA
At 01:29 PM 7/25/02 GMT, you wrote:
>> Right there in the picture was an actively swimming Coral snake.
>
>This reminds me of one of my Amazon adventures. We were hiking
>through the jungle at night, and two of us, me and a Vancouver herp
>student named Brent, got separated from the group. Under the nights of
>our headlamps, we were sampling a small rainpool. A snake slithered
>around our dipnet. Brent, who was hoping to finance some of this trip by
>taking wildlife photos and selling them to photo stock houses, wanted to
>catch the snake so that he could photograph it. Unfortunately, we weren't
>properly outfitted for catching snakes in the dark. I held the light while
>Brent poked through the bottom mud of the pool, hoping to the scare the
>snake into the dipnet. He scared the snake alright. As Brent tried to grab
it,
>it planted its fangs into Brent's wrist. Not all the way, but far enough.
>Suffice it to say, the snake got away.
>
>"You didn't just happen to notice what kind of snake that was?" Brent
>asked.
>
>I know next to nothing about snakes, but knew there were only 2 species
>in this section of the rainforest we had to worry about. The bushmaster
>(which this obviously was not), and the (banded?) coral snake, which lives
>in water.
>
>"Well," I said, feeling a deep sense of dread moving in upon us, "It had
>bands and lives in the water."
>
>"I don't think he really got me, but just in case...."
>
>Brent pulled from his back-pack an anti-venom kit, basically a syringe big
>enough to inject a horse. We were about a mile's hike back to base camp.
>
>"We'll walk back slowly," Brent said. "And if anything starts to happen to
>me, just pull down my pants and give me the shot."
>
>"Okay," I said. I had never injected anyone with a needle before, except
>myself, by accident. (I was dogsitting a diabetic dog and had to give it
daily
>insulin injections. One day the dog squirmed and I plunged the needle
>into the hand that was attempting to hold the dog still. Ouch.)
>
>Anyhow, it was the longest one-mile hike in my life. And Brent's. But we
>made it back to camp just fine. We told our nature guide, Segundo, what
>happened, and I drew a little sketch of the snake's pattern.
>
>"Oh, that's the *false* banded coral snake," Segundo said. "Harmless."
>
>Which was a good thing, because I had no desire to see Brent's ass.
>
>Chris Scharpf
>Baltimore
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