If it’s a black snake or something non-venomous, I’ll let them live, otherwise their head will get introduced to an axe.
You’ve heard of the zoom feature, right? I doubt if I got closer than its body length when taking the pics. It’s a lot smaller than it looks in the images.
I agree with this 100%. We get a lot of black racers and garters. When the kids were little we'd capture one occasionally, keep it for a few days to observe, and then let it go.
True of pit vipers, I believe.
Not sure about that. In some areas venomous snakes, and even rattlesnakes specifically, perform an important function of controlling rodent-borne diseases; see for example this link, concerning California rattlesnakes.
Good on you for moving the black snake! But I don't quite get the "venomous" vs "non-venomous" dichotomy you seem to be setting up. As I understand it, it is more that each species occupies a niche, and if you eradicate a species, something else will up-populate to occupy that niche, and it's not always possible to predict what species (maybe plural) that will be. Or the population the species was controlling might multiply out of control. It also depends on the size of the population of each species. If you eliminated all the timber rattlers in Vermont the effect would probably be negligible, since there are only something like a few dozen of them. In a state like California where rattlesnakes are a lot more common, it might make rodent control a much bigger problem.
You might or might not. It would all depend, hard to predict. I don't worry about rattlesnake roundups or culling efforts either, because in most areas where they happen there are tons of rattlers and you're barely making a dent in the population anyway. Sort of like deer harvesting to control a population out of control. But ending the bounties in places like New England was IMO the right move, because the populations are now endangered, at least in VT and NH. YMMV.
Either that, or a Malthusian catastrophe will reduce our ranks drastically. But either way, I agree that nature will be just fine, in the long run.
Good video. I learned something from it too. I always thought mammoths had gone extinct at the end of the Pleistocene or soon after, never knew there were any still alive at the time the pyramids were being built in Egypt. But apparently there was an isolated population on Wrangel Island up until about then (at least according to Wikipedia's article on the wooly mammoth, citing a fossil specimen from 4300 BP).
Dogs evolved from wolves who lost their fear of humans, and then became domesticated by humans over succeeding generations. Some Russian scientists captured a group of wild foxes, selected those who seemed most "friendly" for successive breedings, and watched as the new generations of foxes changed into animals that increasingly resembled dogs in temperament -- and even in physical appearance in some ways.
