Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss snake chaps

Hello all, thanks in advance for any advice.

So the fiance is finishing up college, and her last semester she has a really cool opportunity to take part in a study about the 3 differnt box turtles native to the area. She'll be trapping, tagging, radio-tracking and a whole bunch of other neat stuff like working in a turtle rehabilitation lab for turtles that are injured by traffic and lawnmowers and such (field experience, real transferable skills for her field, which is just plain awesome), all of this before she heads off to hawaii for 6 months for a completely unrelated internship documenting the productivity of green sea tutle nests in february. As you can guess, for a budding conservation biogeographer, she really needs to excel at the first one in order to completely blow thier minds away at the second, and hopefully land one of those sweet federal jobs when she gets back.

So the next part of the story is that she's a wuss. completely terrified of snakes, although she has been surveying them for going on 4 years now, can't get over it. There is nothing serious around here, i mean, of course there are some cottonmouths, which are very serious, but chances are that she is going to just encounter black rat snakes, northern water snakes and garter snakes. The lake that she'll be hiking around with the radio tracker for the box turtles has proven to be chalk full of black rat snakes before, and is pretty much surrounded by tall, waist-high grass that she'll have to wade through to get to the turtles she is following.

So i told her about when i was in the boyscouts, we used to make snake chaps our of split cedar, birch bark and twine. She googles it and sees some from cabelas, gander mtn etc.

All you PBers in appalacia, the south, rockies and further west where you have more dangerous things to deal with: do you have any advice on buying a pair that would make her feel safer? that would protect her if need be? also, since she'll be wading through grass and possibly along the shoreline between classes and before work..waterproofing would be nice, but we could always spray that on if necessary.

So what do you think...just a thick pair of dickies? should we strap some titanium plates to her calves? Hockey Goalie pads? Any thoughts?

I would watch out for any stiff ones. We had the plastic ones and some really stiff fabric ones that were knee high for working out in cedar scrub. They were annoying to wear, rubbed and chaffed around my knee when walking, so usually stayed in the house.

I always seem to feel invincible in some chest-high neoprene waders along with ample amounts of Jim Beam Black.

Well, she was hoping for knee-high, but i can run the neoprene by her, lol. I think she has to fit them in her backpack, though.....and her version of JB black would be an appletini, which im not sure of the invincibility factor.

Still, good idea, though.

Although......the mental images you just flashed across the brains of all the PB'ers might be a little disturbing.....

Get her some good waterproof leather knee high hunting boots and a good thick pair of dickies to wear over them. Most snakes will not bite through all that and she will not appear to be terrified.
Just for fun, catch a small corn snake and de-snake (de-sensitize) her, if you dare.

I tried the desensitizing, one of my buddies rescues exotic reptiles (a herpetologist in training), and he has a jungle carpet python named jimmy.....quite harmless once you get over the fact that at 3 inches thin, he is 5' long and will easily strangle you.....

He bit me and i didn't even know it, i moved my leg to fast....She saw that and you would have thought that the lack of pain would have shown her it's not so bad....nope...the fact that that little ball of muscle uncoiled and sprung 4' to strike my leg that was moving too fast just made it worse, lol. now more scared than ever.