Brooke Howard spotted the rattlesnake while fishing in Caney Creek in Texas
A Texas science teacher accidentally filmed a video of her and a friend having the scare of their lives!
Brooke Howard, a fifth-grade science teacher, was fishing in Caney Creek near Sargent, Texas, with a friend the weekend of April 13-14 when she spotted a snake swimming very quickly toward them.
During her trip, she took videos of animals in the stream to show them to her students and lead her Monday classes. So she decided to film the reptile, which she initially thought was a harmless, non-venomous, pot-bellied water snake. .
“…I’m not afraid of snakes anymore,” Howard said behind the camera in the video obtained by PEOPLE, good-naturedly encouraging the animal. “See, there he is, come on, little buddy.”
Brooke Howard
A rattlesnake in Caney Creek near Sargent, Texas
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Off camera, while narrating and filming the snake’s rapid movement, Howard realized she had misidentified the species and corrected herself, later identifying it again as a backpack water snake diamond, which is also non-venomous, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Brooke Howard
A rattlesnake in Caney Creek near Sargent, Texas
But at the end of the 39-second video, Howard saw something that signaled danger: The snake had rattles.
She broke off after describing the black-patterned snake as “non-venomous” for most of the video.
“Wait a minute, is that a rattlesnake? Oh my God, I think it’s a rattlesnake, I’m not kidding,” she told her friend before the video ended suddenly.
Related: 11-year-old bitten by rattlesnake after falling off bike on Colorado trail: ‘He’s a tough boy’
Speaking to Chron about her experience, Howard said that after turning off the video, she and her friend noticed the snake wasn’t swimming to the other side of the dock, so they took the dog they had with them and returned to their house.
“We didn’t go back because we were stressed about it waiting for us,” Howard told Chron.
According to the National Zoo and Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., eastern diamondback rattlesnakes have a “painful, venomous bite, which can be fatal to humans.”
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“The toxin in their venom, called hemotoxin, kills red blood cells and causes tissue damage,” the zoo website continues, noting that human deaths from rattlesnake bites were rare.
Chron reported that the last time a diamondback rattlesnake was spotted in Texas was in 2022, in images taken on OH Ivie Lake near San Angelo, Texas, by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and shared on social networks.
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