Are you sure it was a cottonmouth? They tend to stay at the western end of the state.
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i decided to head to floyds fork this afternoon and i decided to try the first bridge off of seatonville coming from jtown. well im not sure if i want to try it again after almost steeping on a huge cottonmouth and no there wasnt only one of them i saw 3 within a 12 ft radius 1 went under a rock in the water and the other 2 disaperd in the weeds so if you decide to try that first bridge be on your tip toes. man i knew the fork had alot of water snakes but now after seeing a cotton mouth lets just say im going to be allitle more carefull when wading down the fork. i did catch 4 small mouth 2 right at the bridge the biggest was about 15in and man was he fisety. they love the hard plastics more than the twisters and and artifical worms has been my experience when fishing here whats otheres opinion and whats everyones favorite part to wade seatonville?bellsmill?miles park? and which way up or down stream? i have done okay going down stream from the main bridge at seatonville but it gets real shallow after about a mile or so and walking up stream from the very first bridge you get to on seatonville isnt good either i went 3/4 a mile and it was all really to shallow. but i havent been upstream from the main bridge on seatonville if any one has input on favorite lures or places please share
Are you sure it was a cottonmouth? They tend to stay at the western end of the state.
yea im pretty sure i was up close and got a good look had the markings and v shaped head from all the pics of water snakes in ky i keep coming back to the pic of the water moccasin it looks just like the ones in the pics hopefully for our sakes i am wrong but i havnt ever seen a water snake like this before i was gonna try n pick it up but when it got all the way under that rock i decided best not to volunter to go to the hospital for being a dumb ass
Last edited by usmc_0311_hunter; 06-26-2011 at 10:14 PM.
Years ago i was at waverly park fishing on the bank and had one come out of the water right beside me with a little bluegill in it's mouth , Scared the sheet out of me but I never flinched and let it go on it's way. It was 3 feet from me. Never fished from the bank there again. Look just like this one http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...us_%281%29.jpg
Years ago we were fishing around that bridge (The one headed to Taylorsville from J town). We had been fishing there a while then someone noticed worms in the rip rap rock we were fishing off of. Upon closer inspection, it was pit viper young. The only one I know of that is aquatic is the cottonmouth. Needless to say, that day of fishing was over and the race to get out of there was on.
While copperheads are not considered aquatic, they will inhabit areas around streams, particularly when there is rocky banks available. Rattlesnakes will also be around streams, but they are a whole lot easier to identify. I also learned something else about rattlesnakes while fly fishing in the Smokies. They will climb. Saw one hanging in a rhododendrong over Kephart Pron near the confluence with the Occaluftee River.
I've seen many snakes while fishing in this area, but all of them were harmless water snakes. Hope that you just mistakenly identified the snake, as that can be easy to do. Don't want any poisonous snakes swimming/slithering around me while I'm trying to catch some smallies.
True, I should have said semi-aquatic as they like to hang around water, are good swimmers, and have fish in their diet. What I saw were obvious pit vipor young, and since they were in the rocks close to the water, I assumed they were cottonmouth.
If they were pit viper young, is it possible they were maybe copperheads? I didn't think that the cottonmouth's range was this far north. I'll definitely be more attentive to where I'm stepping now though.
It is possible but they didn't have the copperhead markings. Now, I'm not familiar enough with them to know whether they are born with the markings or if they develop them. I also thought those guys prefer a slightly dryer area, but I'll openly conceed that I might be wrong about that. Either way, they were baby pits and that was far too easy to tell.. LOL They were only 4-6 inches long , if memory serves, and I saw them from less than two feet way.
http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/for/for46/f1a.gif
I hope you mis-identified what you saw, becaue if it was a cottonmouth it means it's newly introduced to the area. I have a buddy who has lived for over 40 years on a turnhole bend on Floyds Fork a few miles downstream from US 60, he has seen ever kind of water and black snake on his property but has never seen a cottonmouth. There is lots of stuff on line about the limited area in W-KY where the cottonmouth is seen.
This comes up every now and then and the state biologist people always say there has never been a confirmed finding of a cottonmouth this far east in Ky. There are plenty around Reelfoot and that area in west. Ky.