Every farming season is laced with a litany of hazards, but leviathan-sized timber rattlers are not typically on the list. Across decades walking cropland and woods, Jim Bowen has crossed paths with countless venomous snakes and carries a scar from a cottonmouth bite as his price of admission to the great outdoors. However, during the summer of 2021, Bowen encountered two of the largest timber rattlers of his entire life—6’-plus heavyweights adorned in jagged, black chevron patterns painted against light gray scales. He hopes to never again confront creatures possessing such girth: “I’ve seen a lot of things outside in my life, but I don’t ever want to see another snake that big. I don’t believe I could handle anything bigger.”
Even for a farmer and outdoorsman well-versed in wild pigs, alligators, and snakes of all stripes, the prospect of massive timber rattlers unsettles Bowen. “How big?” he asks. “If I’ve got 6’ rattlers out here that I’ve found on my land, are there bigger ones still to come? In some ways, maybe that’s a question I don’t want answered.”
Incredible Pain
Three miles west of the Tallahatchie River, on the flat, rich soils of the Mississippi Delta, Bowen, 66, grows 1,500 acres of corn and soybeans alongside his son, Jimbo, outside Minter City, straddling both Leflore and Tallahatchie counties. Rubbing against the farmland, the father-son pair also owns 300 acres of forested ground, a wooly mix of hardwoods laced by a network of cypress brakes. Plainly stated, the property is ideal snake habitat.
On average, cottonmouths are the most common venomous snakes on Bowen’s farmland, often attracted to water around extensive polypipe irrigation. Bowen possesses an explosive license to blow beaver dams, a persistent source of blockage on his land and a mecca for cottonmouths. “You can count on at least several cottonmouths at every beaver dam, and you can be sure you’ll always have cottonmouths around polypipe,” he notes. “Generally, I see smaller ones around poly at about 2’, and bigger ones on the dams, usually 3’ with a midsection as thick as your forearm. That’s just average—there’s sometimes cottonmouths much longer than that.”
“That’s just part of farming around here. There are going to be a lot of cottonmouths and you can get bit if you’re not watching close,” Bowen adds.
Point of fact, 30 miles west of Minter City, in Bolivar County, while walking a turnrow in April 2011, producer Bill Ryan Tabb was tagged on the inner left ankle by a 3’ cottonmouth coiled in the withered scrub of burndown grass. “The pain was incredible and it’s difficult to describe how bad my muscles ached,” recalled Tabb.
Tabb required 18 doses of anti-venom, three days in the hospital, and a full six months of recovery. He carries a permanent sense of awareness on his farm: “If I’m rolling up a rice gate to regulate irrigation water, it gets a little nerve-wracking for me. I’m always on the lookout on my farm—that’s for sure.”
Bowen has significant regard for the cottonmouths dotted across his farmland, but he carries even heavier respect for the numerous timber rattlers—often called canebrake rattlers in the South—that tend to populate his forested acreage. “Generally, the timber rattlers are more in the woods, and I steadily come across them when I’m squirrel hunting or scouting for deer.”
Capable of an extremely hot bite packed with potent venom, large timber rattlers are common in and around Bowen’s woods. Even in the colder months of winter, it pays to keep an eye open for a venomous snake, Bowen says. “Valentine’s Day. A few years back on February 14, I walked into the woods with a bucketful of trees to plant, thinking about nothing but the seedlings. I looked down and almost stepped on a coiled rattler, and felt my knees almost give out. That’s when a man realizes how short the handle is on a sharpshooter shovel. I turned around, left the bucket, and walked away. Tree planting was over that day.”
Despite decades spent spotting timber rattlers typically sized from 2’ to 4’, Bowen chanced upon the two largest rattlers of his life during the summer of 2021, and ironically, the first wasn’t even on farmland. At a fraction under 6’ in length, the massive snake’s presence, announced by the shaking of 10 rattles, was initially mistaken for the humming symphony of cicadas—just outside the backdoor of Bowen’s house.
Snakebit and Blessed
During the late afternoon of July 14, arriving home from outpatient shoulder surgery earlier in the day, Bowen and his wife, Karla, prepared to settle in for an approaching evening of rest. Their house, surrounded by a clipped pasture and mowed yard, is hardly a snake haven, occasionally attracting a lone grass or garter snake. However, half a mile behind the house runs Pelucia Creek, and with several freak deluges in June and July, the water backed up and chased out wildlife.
As Bowen eased onto the couch and nursed a throbbing shoulder, Karla’s ears caught an odd buzz—akin to the song of male cicadas clicking in unison, seeking a mate. Opening the backdoor to check on the curious sound, Karla was greeted by a timber rattler, head up and buzzing (10 rattles), coiled 4’ from the doorway.
“Karla walked back in and couldn’t speak. She couldn’t say nothing for a second, and I knew something was bad wrong,” Bowen recalls.
As fast as his bum shoulder would allow, Bowen walked to the gun cabinet, pulled out a .22 rifle, moved toward the back entrance, and shot the snake through the doorway. “I couldn’t believe I was looking at a snake that big. A timber rattler is actually a beautiful creature and there was no pleasure in killing him, but there’s no way I’m going to try to move him and there’s no way I’m going to allow him to crawl under something and possibly hurt my family later.”
“I’ve got serious respect for timber rattlers and poisonous snakes of any kind,” he adds. “I was once bit myself, and I was very blessed in that deal.”
On a fishing trip in 1995, Bowen pushed against a Jon boat lodged on a pond bank and uncovered a 2’ cottonmouth waiting at water’s edge. The snake struck and disappeared into the pond. Wearing flip-flops, Bowen was tagged on the outside of his left foot—two fang marks spaced 1” apart. As a burning sensation emanated from the bite location, Bowen thrust his foot into the ice of a cooler and was in a Greenwood hospital within 20 minutes. “I was the lucky guy and only had to stay overnight. The cottonmouth barely injected any poison in me and I never needed antivenom. Looking back, I’m just glad I didn’t get bit by one of the big timber rattlers, because a farmer across the river got bit by one and it messed him up pretty bad.”
Behold, Leviathan
As referenced by Bowen, Garrett Carver farms across the Quiver River in Sunflower County, outside Ruleville. On a fall morning following soybean harvest in 2013, Carver was hauling grain and filling deer feeders in preparation for hunting season. Clearing and cutting limbs, he reached for a fallen branch and jerked his hand back into his body, instinctively pulling back from searing pain.
Despite a hand on fire, Carver was uncertain of the pain source. By appearance, the wound didn’t match a snakebite: A single hole on the second knuckle of his index finger showed blood, and although the pain level ratcheted upward by the second, Carver was momentarily uncertain about what had pierced his hand.
Subsequently spotting a 2’ timber rattler moving into the undergrowth, Carver realized the gravity of his situation: Whether by misplaced bite or lack of an opposing fang, the single hole represented a timber rattler bite from a lone fang—and the incident could have cost Carver his life. He wasn’t able to obtain anti-venom until 9:30 p.m., roughly 11 hours after the incident. Through extreme pain, gross amounts of swelling, eight doses of anti-venom, three days in hospital, and four months to gain proper function of his hand, Carver received an excruciating primer on the potency of timber rattler venom.
“Now I’m wary,” explained Carver, several years after the snakebite. “Even when I’m on my turnrows, I’m looking around. It makes me pay attention to my surroundings on the farm. This is one of those things that you always see or read about, but never think will happen to you.”
Roughly 150 miles south of Carver’s farming operation in Claiborne County, on a family silviculture operation located in hills rubbing against the Big Black River, Dana Sanders took the full brunt of a heavy-bodied timber rattler in September 2014. Working on a food plot and standing beside a pile of slash debris while cutting limbs for shooting lanes, Sanders stepped backward and felt a tremendous jolt in his leg, just above his 6” boot line. “This was like a board with nails just stuck in my leg,” he recalled.
He estimated the timber rattler at 4’ to 5’, with a head approximately 3” in width. The pain was instant and intense as blood poured from two puncture marks spaced an inch apart. “I knew I’d probably stepped on him and he was just doing what he’s programmed to do naturally,” Sanders said.
Even after morphine shots at a Vicksburg hospital, the pain level was phenomenal, according to Sanders: “The pain had jumped to a 9 or 10; certainly the worst pain I’ve experienced and almost indescribable. It’s localized, but it radiates. It’s almost as if you took a red-hot icepick, stuck it in your leg, and left it. It doesn’t cool, but continues to burn.”
As additional morphine failed to cut the pain, Sanders was given dilaudid—synthetic heroin—to provide relief. Sanders needed 12 shots of anti-venom, five days in the hospital, and several months to physically recover.
Carver’s bite in October 2013 was delivered by a 2’ rattler and Sander’s bite in September 2014 came from what may have been a 5’ rattler. In August 2021, just three weeks after killing an approximate 5’ 11” specimen on his back porch, Bowen encountered the largest timber rattler of his life—an approximate 6’ 2” leviathan.
“Biggest Rattlers of my Life”
On the afternoon of Aug. 21, with a 100 F heat index baking the air, Bowen’s son, Jimbo, drove a Ranger past a soybean field, with his daughter, Ellison, in tow, along with Bowen and Karla. At leisure, the foursome headed toward a back field to check a spot for potential tillage. As the Ranger rolled into a patch of CRP woods, the vehicle was flanked on both sides by 20’ trees as it scooted down a dirt road wide enough to allow ample access by a dual wheel John Deere tractor.
Eyeballing an anomaly ahead in the road’s leafy debris, Jimbo popped the brakes and stopped the vehicle several feet shy of what initially appeared to be a sizable fallen limb. A massive gray timber rattler, distinguished by black V-shaped crossbars and copper marking along its spine, was situated at full stretch across the road. Bowen immediately exited the Ranger and moved toward the side-by-side’s bed, grabbing a potato rake normally used to bust small beaver dams. “I’d never seen a snake that big in my life, but I wasn’t thinking about exact size,” he recalls. “I was trying to get to him before he disappeared. That’s such an impressive creature with incredible markings, and I don’t enjoy killing snakes, but I’ve got other serious safety considerations on our farm.”
The giant timber rattler was 50 yards from Bowen’s soybeans, a major point of concern: “My labor walks in that very field and I’m going to protect them. I myself walk these fields checking irrigation and sometimes I can’t see my feet. I’m doing what is necessary to protect my employees and myself.”
After Bowen dispatched the timber rattler with the potato rake, he noted 11 rattles and a button, and a weight possibly reaching 12 lb.-15 lb. The timber rattler wasn’t measured, but when picked up by 6’4” Jimbo, it stretched just shy of his height. “I don’t want to add or take away inches, so all I can really say is that it was somewhere between 6’ and 6’4” in length,” Bowen describes.
Bowen makes no claims of comparison, other than describing the circumstances of his personal, firsthand accounts. “I’ve been told many stories about big snakes and I can’t say what is true and what’s not. At least in my area, I’ve always heard serious accounts of people finding some very, very big rattlers. I remember an older man, Edgar Smith, that used to live here and pulled two huge timber rattlers out of a bush hog. Maybe they were bigger than the ones I just saw; maybe not.”
No matter. Bowen has no interest in crossing paths with more monster rattlers. “I’ll watch after my family and my labor, but otherwise I’ll leave the snakes alone. The two biggest rattlers of my life separated by a matter of weeks is enough for my lifetime.”
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