Stephen F. Austin State Park

Yesterday was a beautiful day and we decided to head out to one of the nearby state parks for some walking and geocaching.

The park is situated on the Brazos river and since there has been quite some rain in the last few weeks the river was nice and wide.

Everything was beautiful and green and some of the trees were completely covered in ivy, from top to bottom. Quite spectacular.

 

These mushrooms were growing on a tree trunk.

The walk was not always easy :)

And of course we found some caches.

At the end of our walk we were standing still, determining our direction and wondering if we should find another cache. All of a sudden Famke stated very 'matter-of-factly': 'snake'. And yes, there it was, just of the path, slithering away from us in the tall grass. Too quick for us to take a picture.

As we are by no means snake experts we just noticed the colors: yellow, black and red bands, more black than colors. Long live Google! By doing some searching we came to the conclusion that it had been a coral snake. There are more snakes with the same colors but it is all about the order of the colors to determine if they are poisonous or not. As it goes, the coral snake is not one of the nice guys.

For next time, we will just remember the rhyme:

Red touches yellow, kill a fellow - Red touches black, venom lack.

Some (reassuring) snake bite statistics from the Texas Department of health

• About 7,000 people are bitten by venomous snakes in the U.S. annually.

• Only 0.2% (1 out of 500) venomous snake bites result in death

• On average, 1 to 2 people in Texas die each year from venomous snake bites in Texas.

• Roughly half of all venomous snake bites are "dry." That is, the snake does not inject venom into the victim.

And for those who want to read even more: http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/idcu/health/zoonosis/animal/bites/information/venom/snake/