Originally Posted by
RubeRad
A friend that rides a lot more than me told me he runs over rattlesnakes all the time. Just thump thump and keep going. My wife ran over one once too, I was maybe 50m behind her on the trail and it was escaped into the brush by the time I got there. I've heard that a rattlesnake cannot strike unless it is coiled, so if you encounter one stretched out across the trail, it is not dangerous (unless you stick around long enough to give it time to coil and then strike). I have no idea if the same is true for all venomous snakes -- and obviously I'm not encouraging anybody to take stupid risks with dangerous wild animals! (I've also heard that the vast majority of snakebites are on the hand, i.e. somebody being stupid)
When I use to live in So Calif, I would ride mountain roads, and they would come out to sun themselves, cars squashed most of them, but when I riding up the mountain I would just give them a wide berth but coming down I would be doing 50 or so I just would run over them as well. I never went back to check, but I don't think a person on a bike running them over would kill the snake, but it probably pissed them off pretty good.
I also seen Roadrunners out in the desert run up to a rattlesnake, and that bird would do this dance where it would bob to the left and then to right and do that several times, and the snake is bobbing with the bird, then the bird will suddenly dart in and poke one of the snake's eyeballs out, then the bird would just as quickly dart back out and resume it's little dance, then it would dart in quickly and take the other eyeball out. Then it would go around to the back of the snake and drive its beak up into the back of the snake's skull and I think it must have sucked the brain out? But that snake would just drop to the ground. Where I was at, we had small Roadrunners, in Arizona they have a larger Roadrunner, and those would flip the snake into the air and eat them whole, I saw a YouTube video of that happening. The guy that narrated the video did say that sometimes the Roadrunner lost to the rattlesnake, it was a risky way of getting food.