Many of our snakes are friendly....they will slowly swim by and pay little attention to you....rattlers attempt to get away from you. Speaking of which....a good friend of ours has a beautiful cabin in rock rattler country....she is walking the trail around the island(they own the whole island, lucky ducks!) and there is this one spot where you climb about 8 feet up a stepped rock....so she is just coming over the top and bam....1 foot away from her, face to face is a 3 foot rattler and he is not too impressed....the rattle starts and it starts to rear back slowly, and she slowly backs off and climbs back down the rock and proceeds to go back into the cabin. She refused to walk the island trail for the rest of the week, which was little surprise!