A Texas woman was attacked by a hawk and a snake at the same time after the snake-eating bird accidentally dropped the reptile on her.
Peggy Jones, 64, was mowing her lawn last month when a hawk, flying overhead, dropped a snake on her before swooping down on the woman to try to retrieve her food.
As it fell, the snake wrapped itself around Jones’s arm and began to strike at his face as the bird, which had already pounced on the woman, sank its talons deep into her body.
As terrifying evidence of the experience, he was left with cuts and bruises on his arm and face.
The bizarre incident took place on July 25 in the town of Silsbee, Texas, near the Louisiana border.
The woman recounts that the snake fell suddenly from the sky, landed on her, and before she could shake it off, the hawk’s attack had already begun.
“As I was trying to pull my arm away from the snake, it got wrapped around my arm,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
“The snake hit my face, it hit my glasses a couple of times. As I was pulling and pulling to get her off me, she just kept hitting and hitting.
Jones realized that the snake had surely fallen from the beak of a bird that was flying over the area, because he was not in a place with trees when this happened to him.
His guess was quickly confirmed when the falcon swooped down and joined the melee.
“The hawk appeared as quickly as the snake appeared,” Jones explained.
There, the bird struggled to remove the snake from Jones’s arm, striking it with its claws several times as it tried to snatch the food.
“He grabbed the snake from my arm and pulled it as if he were going to take it away. When he does, in addition to taking the snake with him, he takes my arm and lifts it up.”
The scene ended well, with the snake slipping out of Jones’s arm as, stunned, her husband rushed to her rescue and took her to the hospital.
“He had puncture wounds, cuts, abrasions, scratches and severe bruises,” he listed, adding to this that, after the attack, his glasses were broken.
The 64-year-old described the attack as severely traumatic, said she thought she was going to die at the time and has had trouble sleeping since it happened.
She told CBS that living in rural Texas, she is no stranger to encounters with wildlife.
“In fact, I’ve seen hawks catch snakes many times. That’s what they do, that’s how they kill their prey.”
But now, he says, it’s something he’ll always keep in mind.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cjezvvynvx0o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-09 12:00:13
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