Part of living in Florida

It's been a long time since I've checked in, so I thought I'd put some pictures up on here. Ever since living in Florida, I've seen some cool bugs/animals, etc. Besides the every day gecko lizard or the multiple cool birds (sand hill cranes, pelicans, the occasional owl), there are a few things I pay some special attention to.

I found a couple of cool things outside today that caught my eye. Most of the pictures below were taken with my cell phone.

The first 2 pictures are a snake I found while mowing the lawn. It heard the lawn mower coming along so it slithered behind this water thing we have on the side of our house. Based on research I've conducted on the Internet, I believe it's a young Florida Cottonmouth Snake (poisonous):


Here's a Wikipedia article and a Florida Snake Website link if you want to read up on it.

The other thing I found was a cool little hairy spider. It was almost all black with some tiny white spots on it's abdomen. The wife and I thought it had 2 huge green eyes, but upon further review, it turns out they were not it's eyes, but it's chelicerae. Here's my picture of the underside of the spider:




Terrible picture I know. I would have gone out to take a picture of the top side of the little guy/gal but I was in my skivvies and the neighbors may have been offended. Here's a better picture similar to what this one looked like:




Well I hope that was interesting to someone out there. Oh yeah, GO BEARS!