Basha brought home a story he wrote from school. His class is doing a unit on writing books and their first assignment was to write a true story. Above is a page from his book. The caption reads:

Then after we walked a few miles my daddy found a pygmy rattle snake.

His story is based on a hike we took last year where we stopped to examine what I thought was a snake skin on the trail. Turned out it was a live snake. We were convinced at first Florida didn’t have rattlesnakes, so I tried to pick it up with a stick. Once I saw and heard the rattle we realized we were wrong about the residence of rattlers. Turns out this particular snake was a pygmy rattlesnake which has really strong venom.

I grabbed our Flip and caught the snake on video. I’m probably 3 feet from the snake while I recorded it – again perhaps not the smartest move. Though I still wasn’t sure what kind of snake it was during the recording, apparently Basha was because you can hear him say “it is a rattlesnake” at the very end of the video.

Snaked! from Nathan Clark on Vimeo.