Keep yer eyes open during barn finds!

Damn. We can't carry guns here unfortunately.
huh!

yu cant carry guns?what? why not? jus kidding! i know yu aussys have sum rediculous laws over there.here in sw missouri we carry all the time in our truks and bikes.concealed carry on yur person takes a special license.yesterday i rode home with a 30-30 win strapped to the back of my harley from my gunsmith.it wasnt illeagal but could of attracted attention from a newbie cop. my gunsmith jus said "hey tell him where yu were and what yu were doing".i live pretty remote so making it home wasnt a problem.
 
I believe your mystery critter is what a hunter friend of mine refers to as a "blackback" Officially "melanistic" whitetail.

You are actually in the highest concentration of them in the world, according to this web page.

http://www.northamericanwhitetail.com/2010/09/22/weirdwhitetails_wt_1201melanistic/

When you get a decent shot of a chupacabra, post that thing! :laugh:

The second mystery pic looks like a lone massive DNA strand.
 
Thanx, JD750ace, never knew about melanistic whitetail. Seen a couple of dark grey ones out here, but no solid black, yet. That DNA strand looking thing I believe is what some folks referred to as 'rods'. They created quite a stir years ago, but I understand that it is just an artifact of CCD imaging technology, occurs with flying insects...
 
My best snake story: riding dirt bikes on a piece of property in upstate SC. It's my first time there so I'm second in the conga line, right behind the guy who owns the place. There's a barbed wire fence line to the right, a 20-25 foot drop to the left with maybe a 6 foot wide gap between these. We are going downhill at a pretty fair clip.

He passes next to a huge tree which is wrapped in honeysuckle vines about 4 or 5 feet up, I see what looks like a stick come flying up oh HELL no it's a black racer snake and is he ever pissed. These things are not poisonous but they will bite and have a crappy attitude on the best of days, being nailed by a pair of knobbies does nothing to improve that. They also have a white mouth, like this:
blackratenakenettrap.jpg


and that's all I saw, a black snake with a white mouth coming right at me with nowhere to go. I did the only thing I could think of: I yanked my right leg around and did a pretty fair can can imitation at about 30 MPH.

zero-x-electric-dirt-bike-01.jpg

The guys behind me said the snake hit the number plate on the right side almost immediately after I yanked my leg out of the way. Scared the shit out of me.
 
It's getting to be that time of the year again. Just a little update.

Keep yer eyes open when you raise the hood!

I hadn't driven the truck for a few days, decided to check under the hood.
Well, lookey here!
UnderHood.jpg

Mama decided to relocate her family to the empty secondary battery tray.

It's critter campout time in the country. A few years ago I found kittens stuffed into the fan shroud area. A few years before that, found some sort of varmint nest atop the dually's manifold. Many years before that, found large half-bale sized bird's nests in my airplane's engine cowling,,, twice.

I'll never forget the torturous sounds coming from under my uncle's hood when he started his truck...
 
HAHA WELL its not a snake. Here we just deal with RATS coming out of your barn finds. While I am here in NC I setup my sons cross bow to get a snake he has on his property BUT the sucker won't come out. I even brought my dog so she could get his ass. Next time I guess but the cross bow is together and ready to go. Tomorrow 10 hours in the car heading back to DIRTY NEW JERSEY....Got to love it. You guys in :laugh:Texas are having some fun.
 
Hay ! 2M.... I think that last photo of your game cam caught a snake falling out of a tree ! Yes they climb and that's usually how they get down ,
just go out to a far out limb and plop to the ground.... must'a had a hankering fer birds eggs !
.....maybe the relative of that 8 foot rattler you murder-cated a while back is hunting for ya !
best thing you can do to remove snakes from your place is Cats ! remove the mice and the snakes go away ! .....but then you need dogs to get rid of the cats because they multiply like Rabbits and then...... well you get the picture,.... get the cats fixed and your good to go !
Biggest Rattler I ever saw was on a tree root over hanging the water on lake shasta.... had to be at least 8 foot long about 5" thick at his thickest point....and he was GREEN as green as a gourd ! and he had rattles on his tail that he never shook even once ! ...we were fishing at the time.
I've seen King snakes with Rattles, gopher snakes with Rattles, both with the original shaped heads , not a rattle snake head....
but that big guy in the lake looked like a Python ....all but the rattles ! and he must have had 20 rattles at least....
I've lived in the boonies all my life and seen Wolves, bear,Mt lion,and bighorn sheep, wolverine, Badger, raccoon, and everything BUT Sasquatch ! and I'm sure I'll see him one day too ! hehehehhehe ! and ALL of that is in CALIFORNIA !!!! i live in his stomping grounds now I should see him traipsing through one of these days ! LOL
.....
Bob........
 
bucks9.jpg


This ol' boy has been hanging out under the apple tree in my back yard for a couple of weeks. He'll disappear off into the swamps any time now, the rut is about to start.
 
So, I'm trying to clank about in my barn, when I hear a faint squealing sound.

A leaking compressor drain valve?
Clogged gas tank vent?
Tire leak?

Nope, coming from under my barn floor.

 
Haha, scorpions. Reminds me of another story.

An ol' rancher friend of mine, German, born and raised out here since the early '30s. Same birthday as Donna Douglas (Elly May Clampett of Beverly Hillbillies). Now, HE had a lotta stories, but you had to hear them in his Germanic broken English. Graduated at 5th grade to help work the ranch, so you had to give him some leeway to get the stories out.

Seems that he was having trouble with certain insects gettin' into his ranchhouse. "Danged centipedes!" he would holler. He hated them things. Talked about them being deadly, crawling around his place at night, getting his family all wound up.

Now, I remember catching a large 7" long, 1" diameter millipede in Arizona, back around 1962. Some folks called those centipedes, and claimed those were poisonous. But for me, a kid, it was a pet. And, we don't have big millipedes like that over here.

Ours are the little 1" long millipedes.

Millipede-vs-centipede.jpg

No problem with those.

Maybe I better start watching out for these centipedes, but still not quite sure what he's talking about.


Some time later, we're sitting out behind his place, watching the deer. I see a scorpion scrambling across in front of us, and get up to stomp it.

"PASS AUF!!! (watch out!). Tha's one of them centipedes, and it'll kill you!!!"

"Naw, that's just a scorpion."

Mild argument follows. Long story short, seems that for the last 70+ years, his broken-English upbringing has been calling them centipedes. I had to buy him a book on insects to get this straightened out...
 
It's that time of year again.
Especially after all the rains we've been having.

Careful reaching around things,
Something could be waiting for you...

View attachment 168347

Oooh that one makes me shiver! Reminds me of the scorpion infested house I recently moved from! Arghhh!
 
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