re: Pretty cool pictures from Lake Ouachita of a harmless snake.

Pic is too blurry to be 100% sure, but the body type and heavily keeled scales look cottonmouthy to me.

The heavy rain has really messed with my little creek. Instead of shallow calm water, it’s now above my boots and has rapids. Had to walk an hour the other day to find just one cottonmouth. It was one of the biggest I’ve caught here though, and it was ready to shed.

In the first pic, it kind of looks like a round pupil, but the pic is blurry. What looks like the eye with a round pupil might actually be that little “shelf” that overhangs the eye on a cottonmouth, but the angle/shadows/blurriness make it look like an eye/pupil. Likewise, cottonmouths generally have a distinct eye stripe (wide, dark stripe right behind eye). Hard to tell if it’s there in that pic. I hate making positive IDs on blurry pics. But without overanalyzing blurry details, at a glance that certainly looks like a cottonmouth. If those pics were all I had to go on though, I’m definitely pinning it before I grab its head.

ETA: If I cover that one tiny part of the first pic that looks like an eyeball, all of the pics scream “cottonmouth”.

Now I do see how you could make it look like a round pupil. But it’s The way the sun is hitting that shiny scale Look behind that and you can make out the cat eye

And a watersnake would have labial bars

Giant triangular head, cotton mouth. Dead it.

100% water moccasin. You can clearly see the venom glands in the head and the band across his face. Anyone that thinks it's water snake does not know their snakes.