Went to a local park today to try a new-to-me camera lens. Its south texas so theres rattlesnakes everywhere as it is, but right now theyre extremely active with all the heat we’ve been having lately.
About thirty minutes after I took this photo, I actually came across a diamondback while out wandering some trails nearby the park I took the title photo at. I was walking, saw it and heard it at the same time. I stood there and watched it for about 10 seconds before it started to take off into the nearby brush and for a few seconds I totally forgot I had a camera in my hand I was so intent on just watching it. This is it, slinking back off into the brush. If you zoom in, you can see 7 rattles, so the snake is about 7 years old. It was bigger around than my wrist, about the size of 2” pipe at the widest part of it, and maybe 3 or 3-1/2 foot long. Not the biggest one I have seen, some of them get longer than I am tall, but this one is still big enough to wreck your day if you tried to do anything more than steer clear of it.
Damn, those feel like a fake animal to me that was made up for films like westerners. It feels odd to read of a very normal encounter with one. Cool as shit