Today we were out at our property and found a dead rattlesnake on the road.
It turned out it was a female, as she had many egg sacks insider her when we cut her open later. She was also full, having just eaten a kangaroo mouse and killed another before she got run over by a car.
this is the 2nd uneaten mouse
Kent decided he wanted the skin so we pulled over and he went to cut her head off.
It was very dead but rigor mortis had not set in, but he still felt the need to cut the head off from previous experiences when he thought one was dead and put it in the back of the car, and it was still alive, just stunned.
Another time, it was dead but the mouth reflexes and muscles still moved and he almost got bitten.
We went to our neighbor, Havier’s house because Kent had to do some electrical work there. We told Havier about the rattlesnake and he wanted the meat. He said it was still good.
Havier knows that there is medicine inside the rattlesnake that you can use for pneumonia – he knows how skin the meat quickly – I was unable to find any information online about this 'medicine" that Havier extracted from the snake - which he said were fat sacks.
I was able to snap a few pictures but it was so fast I missed the opportunity to videotape it.
When Havier cut the snake open the first kangaroo mouse that was partially digested, fell out on the ground.
Havier took the fatty pieces which are good for medicine and got his friend Abruco to hold them for him. He hung the spine with meat on a metal scaffold and the medicine and let the sun dry it while Kent went inside to look at the electrical.
Later, Kent took the skin and the head back to our camper and stapled the skin to a board and it put it on the dash of his truck to dry in the sun.
We spent a lot of time with the head too - which we also kept and dried. There were not many rattles on the tail - which I read later seems to be common that rattlesnakes have evolved past needing to rattle? So their rattles are getting smaller...
What will Kent do with it? I don’t know – probably hang it on the wall with the badger skin...in the mancave...