Slithering Fish Stealers

Watersnakes and garter snakes. These were all over the damn place at one of the recent fishing derby's that we took my son to and it was wild!

We normally see a snake every once in a while, but for whatever reason the snakes that were at this place were fucking abundant that's for sure! I didn't even get to snap a picture of all of them, we saw so many LOL.

Water snakes are certainly easy to spot, they are next to the water or inside of it and they are near the shoreline most of the time. This means that they can just swim around and snatch up the smaller fish that in the area, making a quick meal. That doesn't mean they you would see them ALL the time though, because they are pretty good at hiding, but they also know where to go to stay away from the big scary humans. These snakes must not have gotten the memo!

The garter snake wasn't as much of a concern for me as were the water snakes. We weren't catching massive fish at this place but we were certainly catching some good fish. I was afraid that the little shits were going to jump into the water and steal our fish! We've been at places before that had some water snakes and one time even had water snakes attack the fish that we were catching! The little shits but I guess they are smart enough to know that the big thing on 2 legs is catching their food, so they should fight to get them! These weren't those same group, but regardless I was not thrilled they were there.

We certainly left the snakes alone and didn't harass or hurt them. That's not what I'm about and I made sure to tell my son and the other kids that were around us to do the same. There is no sense in hurting the things because they aren't a threat to us, especially because these ones are not venomous. They do say that supposedly we have water moccasin snakes around here but I call bullshit on that. Hopefully you don't read in a few weeks that some dumbass died because he encountered a highly poisonous water moccasin :D.

These fish were mostly interested in just hanging out in the sun by the water. There were quite a few kids around, so I suspect that they were also very interested in staying out of sight and camouflaged so that they don't get harassed and potentially hurt or killed by some fool lol.

In all we found 1 garter snake and 5 water snakes. The water snakes were certainly much bigger but the garter snake was surprisingly a lot bigger than I've seen many of them! Obviously he was eating good, as were the water snakes. The one you can see in the last photo below was the biggest one for sure and it was the one that we were able to see the easiest. This guy thankfully was just hanging out the whole time we were there, not dipping into the water to get away from people. I almost wanted to feed it one of the bait fish that we caught but I thought better of it, so as to not let any species of animal know that it could get food from a human.

I think one of the main drivers of where we were and the quantity of snakes was that the sun was shining nice and bright, and directly on the shoreline with no shadows. Being cold blooded animals, they rely on the warmth of the sun so these fellas were hanging out, warming up for the hunting of the day. There was plenty of fish around for them to hunt though that's for sure!

What about you, have you encountered water snakes before? Did you get scared to see them or did you learn to appreciate them from a distance? Let me know in the comments!