However, I think Jim comes from the new wave school that snakes are natural and everything natural must be good if we just understand it and respect it. Syphilis is also natural, understood, and respected He has never seen a venomous snake and of course he wouldn’t in the expat mecca of downtown Merida. I have killed around 15 cascabels (the local name for the rattlesnake) very close to the house. One had 23 rattles, the last one several weeks ago had gotten inside the house, after it had struck and killed one of my pet geese. Six geese killed by cascabels, 5 pet ducks by coralillos, 3 ducks by boas. I have killed coralillos, uol posh, cuatro narises (literally ‘four noses’), and large boas. I also have convinced my guys to leave green vine snakes, green parrot snakes, brown racers, centipede eaters, snail eaters, scorpion eaters, and small boas alone.

The common guard of the crossroads is a difficult decision, for being rear-fanged with mild venom it is not lethally dangerous, but who needs a loco aggressive snake flinging himself at you and trying to bite you?

A reply about red on black or yellow is OK for milk snakes, but Russian roulette for the variable coral snake, and the same can be said for the advice to look for tiny thermal detection pits to make a judgement. When I first came here a cascabel drive was initiated after 5 cattle had been killed in a month in a pasture. A lot of cascabels were killed. Then in the past few weeks when my old gray goose was trying to tell me how bad it hurt, I knew it was a snake by the loss of the use her legs, and I knew she had been hit very close to the front porch. I searched but couldn’t find it. That night I was writing about issues far removed from the ranchito, and sometime after midnight got up for another beer and in the darkened room saw a snake writhing on the tile floor. My mind was in Cambridge , MA and was oblivious to the fact that I had been searching for a cascabel, was annoyed that a small boa had gotten in, and before I knew what happened, I had grabbed it, realized what it was and killed it. The same week two people in the pueblo were struck by small uol posh and had to be hospitalized with anti venom. A friend’s dog was struck by the same kind of snake in Cholul and it is still touch-and-go, even though she is a super dog.

The moral for me is not to be fearful and crazed about snakes, but do not dismiss them at your peril. The Jonathan Campbell paperback is a popular paperback guide, but it is not his two-volume treatise on the subject. It is totally unjustified to claim fer de lance snakes don’t exist near Merida, because the reports have placed them a few kilometers to the east. They exist here only 15 kilometers away and there is no invisible barrier.

We live in the Playa del Carmen area.

Thoughts?

Wanna buy a watch?