When I lived in the South, a high school friend and I used to have annual spring "snake hunts" for cotton mouths. Once the air temps were warm enough and the water temps were still rather cool, those snakes would begin crawling up on logs, stumps, low hanging tree limbs, mud banks, etc, etc. We would wear knee high boots, and with 10/22's in hand with 25 round mags filled with "Stingers", begin walking various sloughs, small swamps, old overgrown ponds, beaver ponds, etc.
During a few hours of hunting, it was not uncommon for us to kill dozens of cotton mouths and a few brown water snakes. Some of those old water holes had dozens of snakes lying around not wishing to reenter the cold waters. On some occasions while walking in knee high grass around those narrow farmland sloughs, the grass around and between our boots would start moving and the sounds of crawling snakes would send a quick burst of adrenaline up our spines.
On a few hunts, we saw and sometimes killed cotton mouths so large we referred to them as "flat tires" or "floaters". Usually females, those snakes were 4-5 feet long, extra thick like your bicep, very flat bellies, float much higher in the water and could be super aggressive. Those were the trophy snakes for belts, hat bands, etc, and if only head shot, some people would pay a premium for those. Wading into the shallow waters to retrieve one using a willow pole was a most exciting thing.
There were only a few people around who cared for these type of hunts, and I wish I would have kept the local newspaper articles and pics of the truck beds and tailgates covered with dozens of those wicked things. Especially those trophy "floaters".
