Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1901 — A Live Rattler, This Time. [ARTICLE]

A Live Rattler, This Time.

The snake department of the public echools museum continues to increase with remarkable activity. The latest addition is the most notable. It is a real live rattler, and a big one, too, for this region. It was brought in Saturday by Alf Collins, from-his place in Barkley tp. He and his boy caught it by the time honored method of pinning it down with forked sticks. The snake must be fully three feet long and is fully If inches thick at the largest part. It has seven rattles and a “button.” Rattlers are very sluggish at this time of the year and are not very pugnacious or hard to capture. This one is kept by himself, in a big glass jar, covered witlf wire netting. It is feared that if put into the big box with the common herd, there might be trouble. But if trouble did oome and the blue racers mixed in, the rattler would probably get the worst of it very quickly. The big snake box now contains four or five blue racers, the big spotted fox snake which makes a bluff at being a rattler, the spreading viper or hog nose, and a whole pack of common garter snakes. The latter are lively and voracious, and yesterday one of them took down two live frogs in about as many minutes. The last frog was caught and taken down head first, in a few seconds, and could be heard squeaking its last farewell to life and its joyful jumpings way down in the snake’s middle regions. Mr. Neher, the science instructor went up north Saturday to visit a celebrated snake wintering place, two miles from Dunnville. It is a big sandhill, and snakes resort there by thousands to pass the winter. They told Mr. Neher that as many as 500 have been killed there in one day. It was not a good day for snakes Saturday, however, for Mr. Neher saw only three and captured two of them, both blue racers.

Another recent interesting live addition to the museum is a siren or mud eel. A not often seen reptile, though once in a great while caught in fishing. Still another, very interesting recent acquisition is a live muskrat. This fellow really deserves honor above all the beasts, birds and wriggling things in the museum. For he voluntarily sacrificed his liberty in the interests of ecience. He had evidently heard of the school museum and came to offer himself as a subject. He was found in the basement of the new school building and caught there, ooming in no doubt, by the way of the sewer pipes.