You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 29, 2022, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria.

And that's it. It's just what is happening now. Evan is on a scheduled break this week is doing something really good.

And Jay's traveling, so he's also, he was sick last week completely unrelated.

He may or may not be here next week and depends on what his travel plans are.

It's the summer. Summer is very disruptive. There's going to be a lot of swapping in over the next month or so.

But first I want to tell you guys about a nature encounter I had. We like to tell about our nature encounters.

And as Cara likes to say we live in the woods.

You do.

I guess.

And have there are woods near my house. Yeah.

So anyway, Sunday was like a beautiful day. Like one of the first weekend days where we didn't have anything scheduled.

So we're doing a lot of yard work. You know, my wife says, oh, you know, Autumn, it's our daughter found a dead snake near the garden where you get rid of it for us.

And I'm like, hmm, I immediately knew what would happen because we have I have fencing around my garden.

And at one point I put up some like mesh fencing to keep little critters out.

And then it didn't work out so I got rid of it. But there was some left behind. I'm like, I pitched that snake a car in the mesh.

Oh no.

So I went there was a it was a rat snake, which is it was a black rat snake.

Not that big, probably a juvenile.

It was absolutely completely entwined in the mesh.

And it looked dead. And so I was getting ready to just cut it out and get rid of it.

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