I know all about guilt by association....my brothers would pull a stunt and leave me in the middle of it while Dad was coming up the stairs 3 steps at a time. Our best BB gun adventures were at a local gravel pit. There were these black snakes in there....too skinny and too far north for cotton mouths but they were aggressive. We'd throw chunks of rock in and soon enough they'd surface and start swimming around with their mouths open to bite something. The trick was to hit them in the mouth....they'd straighten up like a stick and sink back down. Damn that was fun....I never liked snakes.
When I lived in Nevada a guy I knew had a nest of rattlers behind his garage. It's illegal to kill rattlesnakes so he called animal control. They said they'd have someone come right out. A week later no one had come. He put raw hamburger scattered about. That attracted the road runners. In one day, no more snakes. Just fat road runners.
I was walking through our parking lot when I saw a rattler. Must have been 8 feet. It wasn't doing anything but minding its own business. Out of the air a hawk dropped down, like a stone, swore at me and picked up that snake in seconds.
Have you ever seen a hawk hunt? They drop straight down. No flapping wings. Silent death from the sky.
One of the old timers told me, this is the desert. In the desert, everything bites.
