How close was your closest Beaver, Bat or Amimal?

Everybody says it’s a life changing experience, some people find Jesus, and some people go absolutely crazy…………. The guy before you is still running around through the woods in the back channel making bird noises!

Does a 4′ cottonmouth between your feet on shore, while catfishing count?

How about a 3′ cottonmouth chewing your sunnies that was on a stringer over the boat?

Then we got a 5′ cottonmouth chewing on your sunnie-bait that floated up on shore, right next to your cat rod.

Got the tarantula that crawled up to get nice and cozy while catfishing one evening, trying to stay warm.

Sure don’t miss Texas…..
I think that is why I don’t catfish much anymore either….too many flashbacks.

I happened to stumble on this post and had a good laugh reading it. As Sean mentioned, during LPO this year we had a squirrel join us in the boat. We were dragging jigs in the back channel, I am in the back of the boat, I look down and this fox squirrel is swimming after us. I flick my rod tip in front of him thinking he will turn, he grabs it and climbs over it and into the back of the boat. There is a rumor going around that I screamed like a girl–totally untrue—it was a very manly scream. The squirrel perched on the gunwale about halfway to the console and stared at me. I grabbed a cheaper pole—I had been fighting him with my new St. Criox up to then—and started trying to knock him in. It was quite the battle but I finally won. Fishing beside us were Dean and Steve Vick and Steve witnessed the whole thing—I guess it was a sight.

Gary’s mention of snakes reminded me of my youth in Southern Illinois. I have a ton of snake stories and none are very fun to return to in my memory. I was squirrel hunting once and got in the woods before daylight. I had a tree the squirrels were cutting nuts in and I sat under it waiting for daylight. It was a very cool morning and as the sun came up I stretched out to catch every ray and warm a little. As I looked around I looked down where I had my hand and about a foot away was a curled up Copperhead. Needless to say I got up and moved—I shutter to think what would have happened if I had put my hand on him.

Another time I was fishing a rip rap shoreline on Crab Orchard Lake. THe rip rap was made of old concrete road sections. I stepped down on a chunk of concrete that was held up a little ways by re-bar in it. I felt something and look down and there was a cotton mouth wrapped around my leg. It just wrapped around real quick and then unwrapped. I threw my rod and bucket and headed up the hill thinking I was dead. When my heart rate slowwed below 500 beats per second I figured out what had happened. The snake had been under the piece of concrete lying on the piece beneath it that was connected by the re-bar. My weight had pinned the snakes head—by the grace of God–and it had been thrashing to get free. I hate to think if it had had it’s tail pinned. That story still gives me the shivers when I think about it.

I sure don’t miss all the snakes down south but the new place in South Dakota has rattlers so I am sure there will be new stories to come in the future.

Kind of reminds me of the story when I has a monster fish on the rum bury itself in a bush in the water. I waded to the bush and followed the line with my hand into the murky water. I kept feeling for the gill plate so I could scoop it out and I felt a concussion underwater. Then another. It took me about .01 seconds to realize it was not a monster fish, but a snapping turtle.

I am not ashamed to admit it. I screamed like a girl, through my pole and tried running on water. I always wondered what the people on the other shore though of me.

Once while living in Texas right outside of Houston a friend and i decided to go fishing in a boyou that he fished in. Where we were fishing is about 5′ to 6′ above sea level and the whole area has these ditches that hold runoff water when it rains and boy does it rain that close to the coast, it just opens up. Anyway we were walking down this minumim maintainence road behing this chemical refinery twards the fishing spot he was taking me too. We walked twards these two ponds and there was a small dam and a culvert between them that ran under this small road. We crossed the dam and jeff turns right and im trying to follow him as close as i can, maybe the reason he always walked so fast was because of the snakes around. Anyway he turns left and im about 3 steps behind him and i look down to the ground on my left and heres this huge snake coiled up ready to strike and hes only about 2′ away and my left foot hasent reached the ground yet. I just froze and didn’t put my foot down, he definately would have nailed me. I said jeff come look at this snake and he gets excited and says what kind is it and i said hell i don’t know but the (%@^****) thing is huge. By this time the snakes slides down the bank and gets in the water and Jeff goes right in after it. Heres this snakes striking at him and jeff was so fast he never hit him. He grabs the snake by the neck and proud as could be comes up the bank of the boyou and this snake is moving his arm right and left trying to get out of the grip of his hand. He gets to the top of the bank and says man look at this cottonmouth, this thing was 4 ft. long and was really pissed. He said you ever seen the venom from a cottonmouth and i said no. He put the fangs through his t-shirt and the snake had so much venom that it filled his mouth and ran down the snakes side. If i would have put my foot down this snake would have nailed me and with as much venom as it had in it i would have been one sick puppy. He took the snake back to his truck and put it in a gunny sack and took it to my parents house and walked right in the front door with it and my parents made a beeline, one for the top back of the couch and the other ran to the kitchen, i mean a full run. He said whats wrong you never seen a cottonmouth befor? He literally scared the living sh– out of my parents. He took the snake outside with my mother pleading and took it home to his dad, his dad said turn it loose in front of the house in the bayou, they do this to keeps the rats dawn. What an experience!

I just found this site a few weeks ago, and I was perusing threads. There are some good stories here and I thought I’d chip in and add some of my own, even though this discussion has been idle a long time. This will be a long post since I’ll list a few neat encounters.

Besides being a fisherman (with a very small motor boat), I do a lot of paddling in a solo canoe (so much paddling that I have three different solo canoes for different types of conditions). When returning from a trip on a small river at dusk or after dark, I cannot begin to count the number of beavers that have tail-slapped within 3 to 5 feet of the canoe. Sometimes I’ll toy with them and try to predict where they will surface, or once they surface I’ll coast straight at them without making a sound and they don’t even know I’m coming. I’ve nearly collided with a few, and it’s sort of “payback” for me to scare the crap out of a big ol’ bull beaver to make up for the ones that have startled me.

Once in early-early spring I was on a local, shallow river with a solo canoe. It was dusk, it was getting super cold, and I was in a hurry to get back to the landing. I saw lots of muskrats around, foraging for whatever still-edible vegetation they could scrounge from the bottom at that time of year. I didn’t pay them much mind until one of them popped to the surface just one foot from the canoe as I was rapidly cruising by. Now, that has happened to me a couple other times, and in each case, the muskrat simply had a startle response and crash-dived. Not THIS particular muskrat. In the blink of an eye after he broke the surface, he launched himself upward without even pausing, “leaping” out of the water high enough that three-quarters of his body length was in the air, with his head aimed right at me and his teeth bared, and in that instant he screamed at me. It was over and he was gone before I could even process what had happened, and I’ve never been so scared by a muskrat in my life. I could have touched him with my hand if I had been ready (not that I would have), he was so close. It happened way too fast for me to reason things out and realize that this was just a threat display. MAJOR startle factor for me when this happened.

I see that one guy here listed a number of dry-land encounters with snakes, so I’d love to describe my favorite dry-land encounter with an animal. I was on a solo road trip in northern Wisconsin, and I saw an old truck parked in a clearing that was of particular interest to me on account of my lifelong interest in such things, so I stopped to do some harmless trespassing and have a look at it. When I was by the truck, I saw a snowshoe hare leap into the air from behind a pallet load of bricks that was nearby. The hare hit the ground running and was gone in two seconds. Then, appearing right behind it was a very big fisher! Wow, so cool. I watched the fisher rapidly bird-dogging back and forth, looking for some sign of the hare, but it was too late for him to ever see it again. The fisher figured this out and headed off, loping the way they do, never having seen me, but I saw which way it went which was toward a nearby cluster of trees so I dashed 30 yards into a little clearing that was right by those trees, planning to get ahead of him. I got there and stood perfectly still and made squeaking sounds with my lips, and a few seconds later the fisher was running full speed in a perfectly straight line straight at me! I remained perfectly still and the fisher froze like a statue just 12 feet from me, looking up at me, and I swear he had an “oh poop!” expression on his face (ah, I see this site edits mild cuss words). Then he took off at a right angle, then veered toward the highway. I lost sight of him in some brush and weeds but I could see the part of the highway that he had been heading for. At that moment I could hear a redneck pickup truck (with roaring mudder tires) and the timing all seemed perfect for the fisher to intersect with the truck and possibly get clobbered, and I was really worried for him thinking it might be careless during its hasty get-away from me. Well, the truck kept coming and I saw no fisher. Then the truck went by and I saw no fisher. Once the truck was gone, THEN the fisher dashed across the highway. Smart animal – it had waited for the truck to go by before crossing!

One time I was canoeing with a group of folks in Missouri, and for a while I paddled all by myself. I saw a mink come out of the water with a big crayfish. I side-slipped the canoe right up next to him and he ate the crayfish with me sitting just five feet away. This was a “touristy” river and the mink was clearly accustomed to seeing people in canoes, so maybe this encounter doesn’t count, but it was neat to see a mink doing something that one does not see every day, and to see it for an extended time like that.

Which reminds me of the time I was solo canoeing a very small, tree-tangled creek. I was heading upstream and I had seen a really big wake zip ahead of me. I figured it was a carp but I had never seen carp like that in this creek. A short while later, I was threading my way through fallen trees, and up ahead about 40 feet, there was an otter, perched over the water on a slanting willow trunk, eating a fish. It ate the fish tail first, just like the nature books say that they do, devouring every scrap, though I couldn’t tell if it ate the head. I’m pretty sure that the wake I had seen moments earlier was that same otter, under the water and dashing ahead of my canoe, either getting away from me or pursuing prey.

One time I was fishing a backwater of a large river, on the back side of an island where the water level was raised by a series of beaver dams (dams functioning in both directions, since this backwater was fed by a tributary creek). I couldn’t bring myself to leave when the sun went down and I kept fishing well past dark. At one point, I was reeling a Jitterbug (surface lure) back to the canoe and a fish struck at the lure but missed, as commonly happens at night. I retrieved the lure closer, hoping the fish would follow and strike again. The fish DID follow, and it DID strike again, but not in the way I hoped. The fish apparently got a glimpse of the spot where the surface of the water was “broken” by the bow of my canoe, thought “Ah-ha, there it is!”, and charged. BANG! As I sat there pondering what had just happened, my canoe slowly pivoted in place from that sideways impact directed smack into the point of the bow, and the boat eventually rotated in place almost 90 degrees. That poor fish, probably a bass, must have had a headache and a banged-up jaw from that mistake.

Twice when canoeing a shallow, weedy river at night, I’ve had small bass leap from the water and land in the boat. When they suddenly realize there’s a big moving shape right next to them, they’ll assume it’s a giant predator and leap from the water, which is how two of them so far have ended up in the boat. And more times than I can count, in that same river, my canoe has been rammed by big carp swimming at high speed. Often I can see a fin or a mouth breaking the surface and I’ll aim for that as I cruise along. The canoe is so quiet that the carp will almost never know it’s there until it’s right on top of them. That particular fish will bolt, and often the shock wave they create will startle one or two other carp nearby to do the same, and if they happen to flee in the wrong direction, they sometimes crash smack into the canoe, though it’s only a glancing blow since the canoe only draws 3 inches of water or so (not like that poor bass that targeted the bow and struck it intentionally).

Many years ago I was in a tiny rowboat (similar to a canoe) on the same, shallow river. The rowboat is also dead-quiet. It was a mirror-calm night, and as I was briskly cruising along, I noticed that the boat sliced through a band of tiny ripples, then was back into mirror-calm water again. Something was out there swimming! I quietly circled back, turned on a little light and scanned the water in the direction from which those ripples had come, and one eye shone back at me, then two eyes as the animal turned to look at me. I rushed over to the animal, and it was a young raccoon. The raccoon was pretty smart because even as I pulled right up alongside him and kept pace with him, he didn’t veer off course, but stayed right there. I think he knew that escape was impossible so that the only thing that made sense was to keep swimming directly to the shore and hope I didn’t hurt him. There was nothing to be gained by terrorizing the little guy, so after cruising right alongside him for about ten seconds, I veered off his course, coasted a bit, and let him continue on his way. The river was at least 500 feet wide at this spot but apparently that didn’t stop him from deciding to cross. This was in September or October, and being a young coon, he was only very recently off on his own.

And finally, one more animal-in-the-water story. Ages ago I took that same little rowboat way up the river, right after ice out, up into the higher section that’s just a little creek. On the way back down, I saw a meadow vole swimming across the creek. I’ve read that they are very comfortable being semi-aquatic, but I didn’t expect what was coming. Just playing a silly game, I cut in front of the little guy, putting my boat between him and the shore that he was heading for. Unfazed, he swam right up to the boat and when he got there, he simply dove under water and swam beneath it, popping up on the other side and heading into the grass. Smart little guy. Again, something neat that you don’t see every day.

“The weird thing was that the fish house was at least three hunded yards from the shore. I guess muskrats can hold their breath for awhile!”

Okay, I guess I can’t figure out how to do an individual reply just yet, but this is a reply to the post by “mile832”.

I have a very old book (~1940) about general outdoor skills which has a little chapter on muskrats. The book says that muskrats make long crossings under the ice by “refreshing” their air supply along the way. Apparently they will exhale under the ice and then wait for a while while carbon dioxide dissolves into the water and some amount of oxygen that is dissolved in the water enters the bubble. Then the muskrat puts his nose up against the ice and inhales all the air that he can re-collect. This is not as good as getting a fresh breath of air but it greatly extends the distance under the ice that he can travel.

I can’t promise that this accounting of muskrat know-how is true, but the info did come from a trained naturalist who had studied muskrats more than most of us ever will. It’s worth mentioning that this same principle allows aquatic insects and spiders to remain submerged for far longer than the volume of their air supply “should” make possible, due to the bubble acting as a physical gill which gives off carbon dioxide to the water, and takes in oxygen from the water too (with the process being driven by a concentration gradient). With insects and spiders, they cannot remain submerged indefinitely by this method because nitrogen in their air-supply bubble gradually dissolves into the water and the bubble becomes smaller and smaller. For the muskrat, the same might occur if they COULD stay under the ice that long, but I think the bigger problem during the minutes that it takes for them to make a long crossing, would be re-capturing all the air they exhale. I’m sure they end up with less air in their lungs after doing this procedure even a single time, let alone over and over.

My, this is an old thread…but okay.

Years ago, we rented an old log cabin in northern WI to do some late fall musky fishing. Early one morning, well before sun-up, I was sleeping soundly and awaken by what I at first thought was my buddy trying to nudge me awake on my shoulder. I layed there and tried to gather myself, wondering who was trying to wake me in the pitch darkness on such a cold morning. I soon realized an animal was tucking itself in with me up against my bare chest. Flipping the covers and the beast off of me, I turned on the lamp and found the culprit flying silently around the room – a bat. We dispatched it with a tennis racket the cabin owners kept there for just such occasions.

Back in my college days, a buddy and I were float tube fishing on Lake Fuqua OK in shorts and t-shirts. Right around dusk, we were fishing a small bay, floating and fishing within 10′ of each other, when a beaver popped its head up right between us. I could have easily touched it with my 6′ rod, except my buddy freaked out causing the beaver to tail-slap in panic. We went into panic mode ourselves, thus ending our evening of fishing.

In 1984, a group of us went on a canoe trip to the Yukon Territory. We traveled about 500 miles down the length of the Big Salmon River and then down the Yukon to Dawson. It was August and salmon migrating up the mighty Yukon had reached their home waters of the Big Salmon. Bald eagles lined the river waiting for the adult salmon to spawn before going through their death throes. My buddy and I saw a large salmon jump out of the river a couple times and then it leapt next to us. It landed on my Duluth pack in front of me and before I could react it flopped back into the river. I had heard the phrase “the fishing was so good they were jumping into the boat” but that’s only time I saw it happen.

Last summer casting on the Two Harbors breakwater I had an otter come up and sit about two feet from me while eating a small fish. I just kept reeling and it just licked its chops when it finished with the fish and went right back in the drink. I felt sort of honored to share the time with the furry critter. Neat animals.

I was at a neighbors doing some things for her when this raccoon cub climbed up a handrail next to me. More curious than anything, it hung around long enough to get the picture, then joined others and went up a large cottonwood tree where I suppose home was for it. The picture was taken at about two feet.

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Probably about 10 years ago, the eagle that nests up the Greycloud Channel on that power pole by where that culvert cut comes in had gotten so bold that she would fly down from the power pole nest and land on the bow of larger boats. I’d guess somebody had started feeding her little sunfish and she got tired of trying to pick them out of the water so started demanding to just get them off the casting deck instead. I’m sure that freaked some people out when they pulled up not knowing and an eagle came swooping in for a touchdown on the bow.

We get followed all over a river system in Canada by an eagle. About 5 years ago, I had a hammer handle northern that got deep hooked and died. That eagle spotted that northern floating from about 2 miles away and he’s remembered that ever since. I believe it’s the same eagle but in the morning when we leave the camp, you can see him take off from a tree about a mile away and he takes up a position and watches us. I give him the first small pike, eagle gotta eat too, but he will follow us for miles until he gets his pike. He has made some very workman-like efforts to carry away pike, I’m not sure what the lift capacity is of an eagle, but he really has to put the beans to it to get off the water with some of them.

Working in the yard, went into the shed to get something. A squirrel jumped on my head {buzz cut head}, ran down my back and back of my leg. I was wearing shorts and no shirt. Not sure how many toenail holes I ended up with.
Riding my motorcycle at night, had an owl fly off a fence post at my headlight and hit my leg.
Shot a doe one year. Grabbed her ear to spin her downhill to field dress. She stood up and looked at me while I still was holding her by the ear. She ran over the hill where a buddy finished her.

muskrat swimming up in the spear hole will wake ya up!! and 2 times had a buck play in front of me on my Harley way tooooo close!!!

chico-diablo wrote:

Two close ones, while fishing a tournament at Lake Livingston TX, we where fishing along the bank and a snake dropped out of a tree into the boat, had a heck of a time getting him out. Next one was at Kissamee, hooked into a nice bass and was about ready to pull him into the boat and a gator cameup and grabbed him, scared the s…t out of me and the guy I was fishing with.

When I lived in North Carolina I have never seen snakes as aggressive as those. Always had to be on the watch from overhanging trees, and these suckers would come off the bank and swim out to the boat and try to crawl up the outboard or anything else they could get a hold of. This area was part of the inland water way around Elizabeth City

I used to snake hunt the swamps in Georgia using waders and never seen behavior like this before.Snake meat is delicious.

While shorefishing at night had a deer come barreling out the woods and jump in the river no more than 10 to 15 feet from me, sucker swam across onto shore.

Again shorefishing had a lil weasel friend in the crack of a concrete structure for a couple years always pop his head out and check on me when I was there.

Buck charged me and stop 10yds in front, almost shat my pants on that one. Yearlings on the other hand get pretty friendly on trails and will playfully run and away and come back many times. Funny things.

More close encounter beaver tail slaps than I can count. Muskrat splashes, coon families, when you spend years treading the river at night you get alot of runins. Luckily no sketchy human interactions yet, and luckily all the critters while close have never bitten.

I had a beaver slap its tail right next to my boat when trolling at night. One time we were all sitting around a campfire with a couple barley pops and a bat flew right into my buddies chest.

Once again, being new here, I haven’t figured out how to do a direct reply. This is to Tom P.

The idea that snakes are “aggressive” comes from misunderstanding how they behave, and not knowing that their behavior is entirely pre-programmed within their little pea brains. Instinct.

Snakes that try to climb into a boat have ZERO interest in you, and in fact, they have no idea that some large living critter is in the boat at all. Their instincts program them to seek out objects that are out in the open, away from the woods, etc., at those times when they are looking to soak up the heat of the sun, or to use the sunshine to help keep skin parasites or skin diseases in check. If you find a place where snakes do what you described, you could just as well anchor an empty boat there to determine what is happening. The snakes would do exactly the same thing with an empty boat. They are NOT approaching your boat to interact with you personally.

I’m just a guy who tries to help now and then when it comes to folks who misunderstand (and usually fear) snakes.

I was moving into my 1st apartment on the 2nd floor and when I opened the BR door to bring in my first box there was a bat flying in circles around the room. I shut the door quickly, then cracked it open and turned the ceiling fan on. I go back to my parents and suit up for battle, coveralls, hoodie, ski mask, welding gloves and a landing net. When I get back, no bat. Not too many days later the bat was forgotten and I was vacuuming the floor. As I flipped the power cord around it banged off the refrigerator grill on the bottom. This resulted in a high pitched ticking noise that I could hear over the vacuum. Being 18 I had no idea what’s under a refrigerator but thought maybe a fan or some moving part was loose. I’m laying in front of the fridge and pull the grill off, lay it with the inside facing down, and as I peek under the fridge that ticking noise is right in my ear. I lift up the grill and there’s that little dude showing his teeth and making a racket. I grabbed a pitcher that had a lid and scooped it up. I let it go under a tree behind the apartment.

Coming home from Eagle Lake, ON southbound 502 we spotted a huge bear about 25ft off the pavement and stopped to look. My wife is in the passenger seat taking pictures and it starts walking north toward the scrub. As it gets to an angle where the cab frame by the back window is blocking it I turn to my wife and we say how cool was that. Right then I can see the bear in the side mirror a nose length from my trailer tire. Thankfully I never put it in park and was able to get moving before it climbed into my fishy smelling boat.

I’ve had a bird hit me in the chest while walking in the yard and another while I was on my motorcycle. I recall riding really late one night and favoring the right side of the lane. I about dumped the bike at 60mph when a doe appeared on the shoulder. I swear her whiskers grazed the throttle. That scared the crap out of me. Several squirrels by my feet in my tree stand and had a chickadee land on my knee once. I once had a chipmunk sit on my foot while I was standing in the yard talking to my wife.

A couple years ago there was a pair of mourning doves that would frequent the garden area right around when I put my seedlings out. They got so used to me being out there they would land right by me and if I didn’t move too fast they would just go about their business.

I’ve had a few run ins with animals while fishing.

Once had a loon jump into the boat and start to attack both myself and fishing partner. It took some work to get the thing out of the boat. Once we did it jumped right back in. We ended up needing to motor away from the area to get it to leave us alone. They was no babies in sight anywhere and we were not near a nest that I was aware of.

Brian, you will like this one. One time while way up in Saskatchewan Canada, I was fishing from the back deck. Out of the corner of my eye I see movement in the splash well of the boat. Sure enough it was a snake. I went from the back deck to the nose of the boat in record time, all while yelling Snake, Snake. My fishing buddy laughed like crazy as I was hiding behind him like a little child. He looks from the front of the boat and says ” that’s no snake ” its a weed. He takes a few steps towards the back of the boat and says ” poop that is a snake ” now we are both fighting for space at the nose of the boat. He says just take the Handle of the net and flip it out. I had no way. He takes the handle off the net and goes to try and flip it out and it ends up slipping off the handle and starts to come at him. Needless to say he made a mess of the boat beating that thing to death with the net handle. To this day I have no idea if the snake was in the boat all the way from Minnesota to Canada, If it got into the boat overnight while at the cabin, or swam and climbed in while fishing. I have no idea of what kind of snake it was other than a dead one at the end. Needless to say I was on high alert for the rest of the trip looking around for more of them.
Last one was last year near ice out while ice fishing. A muskrat came strolling all the way from across the lake towards us, When it got close to use, My cousin decided to get a closer look at it. He was Messing around with it getting it to hiss at him and Jump at him, The next thing my cousin slips on the ice and falls on his butt. That muskrat jumped on him in lightening speed. My cousin was screaming and thrashing around trying to get it off him. My cousin finally get up and starts to run away. The muskrat bites onto his boot and is hanging on. My cousin is kicking his leg like a field goal kicker trying for a 60 Yard field goal. That muskrat hung on for the first few attempts and final went sailing in the air right towards another guy who was bent over laughing. Next thing you know the thing is chasing him around. It finally walks off towards the shore like nothing ever happened. All the guys out there were laughing their asses off.

There’re some interesting new stories here. Since it seems I revived this thread the other day, I’ll pass along two stories that are second-hand, but interesting. I heard both of them from an old friend of mine that I used to work with. For all I know, he might even be a lurker on this site.

The first story is much like that told by “The Famous Grouse” above. This friend of mine was fishing with another guy on a small dammed-up lake surrounded by forest. They were catching bluegills, and as they moved their boat along the shore, a great-horned owl kept flying from tree to tree, staying near them and watching the whole time. They tossed back an undersized bluegill which had been deeply hooked and probably was not going to survive. The fish sat there just barely in contact with the surface, not moving, and the owl sprang into action. It swooped down and plucked the fish from the water, flying right underneath one guy’s fishing rod in the process. That owl had learned that fishermen sometimes tossed out injured fish and was waiting for just that opportunity.

****

This same friend of mine was ice fishing on the backwater sloughs of a large river, fishing for northerns using tip-ups, using large minnows for bait. There was ice where they were fishing, but not far away was a large expanse of open water. An otter showed up, swimming around out there in the open water, diving below the surface and coming up again, and sometimes coming up onto the ice and then going back into the water again. At one point, it was swimming straight toward them, and also toward one of the tip-ups, and it dove when it reached the ice, but presumably kept swimming in the same direction. One of the guys said, “Ha, what if he takes the bait at that tip-up.” Just then, the flag went up and everyone in the group said something like ‘oh crap’. They all rushed to the tip-up and saw that the line was peeling off the spool much, much faster than they had ever seen in their lives. They didn’t know whether to grab the line and try to pull the bait out of the otter’s mouth or let it keep going. They didn’t want to hook the otter.

Then the otter popped out of the water at the edge of the ice, and climbed up on the ice with the bait crosswise in his mouth and the tip-up line trailing behind. The otter looked at the fishermen, and dropped the fish. As my friend described it to me, it was as if the otter spat it out, like, “phew”. Everyone gave a sigh of relief that they hadn’t ended up hooking the critter.

Eric wrote:

I’m just a guy who tries to help now and then when it comes to folks who misunderstand (and usually fear) snakes.

Mine is far beyond a simple fear of snakes. In my world the only good snake is a dead one. I know most are harmless and are good for nature but that doesn’t change my mind. They want to live they just need to stay as far away from me as possible.

Back in the day, partying hard at a campsite, looked down to see a skunk at my feet. Got real quiet and still till it moved on.

Lou W wrote:

Back in the day, partying hard at a campsite, looked down to see a skunk at my feet. Got real quiet and still till it moved on.

I’ve done the skunk thing a couple times and have never been sprayed. I just let them do whatever it is they think they need to do, and they move off. I think they’re pretty mellow creatures.

I’ve done the porcupine thing too. Cool little animals.

And grouse.

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Skunks are indeed mellow. They have the self-confidence that allows them to be that way.

I take walks at night in the neighborhood and in some years I often see skunks. None of them were ever worried by me, and I was not worried by any of them. One night after a very brisk walk, I got home and walked very briskly up my driveway. There’s a detached garage at the end of the driveway, just beyond the spot were I needed to make a sharp turn to the left onto the back sidewalk that leads to my back door. Just as I made that left turn, I saw a skunk on the sidewalk coming the opposite way. We were both within 5 feet of each other by the time each of us knew the other was there. We both made the same reflexive decision – to simply go faster and pass quickly. We passed going opposite directions with less than two feet of clearance between us. I trotted to my back stoop and the skunk apparently scampered across my driveway. I stopped and turned to look at him from my back stoop and he stopped and turned to look at me from the other side of the driveway. I think that both of us said to ourselves, “whew, that was close!”

This thread could be called Close Encounters of the Furred Kind.

You’re doing fine Eric,

To your point, sometime around 2005 we had high water in November. Can’t really call it a flood. The water came up high enough to flood out and serpent that thought they were going to sleep over winter on the banks of the Mississippi.

At that time Aluminum boats were still the choice and there were no less then 12 posters on this site with photos of snakes in their boats.

I had a problem with snakes for my whole life. At one point I decided to get over these things…snakes, heights ect. I went to the Carpenters Nature Center and asked if they could help me with my little problem. It took a few lessons, shaking and sweat, but now I’m very comfortable with them.

Never did have a problem with spiders.

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