NEWS AND COMMENT-Texas, USA: Peggy Jones, 64, feels that she is lucky to be alive after – in a very strange and unusual incident – she was attacked by both a snake and a hawk simultaneously. She was mowing her backyard lawn. Something very normal and gentle until her world was tipped upside down when a hawk flying above dropped their prey which happened to be a 4-foot-long snake onto her arm.
The snake wrapped itself around her arm. She couldn’t get it off. She waved her arm around trying to dislodge the snake while in the meantime the hawk was intent on recovering their prey animal so they dived down onto her arm and started pecking at it viciously.
She suffered considerable injury to her arm as you can imagine. And the snake had tried to attack her eyes but fortunately she was wearing glasses which were broken by the snake.
She was left with puncture wounds, cuts and bruising to both her arm and face. She lives in Silsbee, a small town near the Louisiana border.
She recounts the story as follows:
Just mowing the lawn, minding my own business [when] out of the clear blue sky a snake fell onto my arm. I assumed there was [a] hawk carrying it because I was not anywhere near a tree. The snake was squeezing so hard, and I was waving my arms in the air. And then, this hawk was swooping down clawing at my arm over and over. [The snake] struck my glasses a couple of times. I was slinging and slinging, he was striking and striking, and he just kept hanging on. The hawk grabbed the snake that was wrapped around my arm and pulled it like he was going to carry it away. And when he did, it flung my arm up. The hawk was carrying my arm and the snake with it. I just kept saying, ‘Help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus’.”
Peggy Jones
The hawk slashed at Jones four times before finally wrestling the snake free at which point the bird flew off while Jones ran to her husband in a hysterical state with her arm covered in blood. Her forearm had been torn up by the bird’s talons. Her glasses had been broken by the snake.
She said that her adrenaline took over but at one point she thought that, “I’m going to die right here”.
She had seen a hawk pick up a snake before because it’s not that unusual where she lives. And she has been bitten by a snake before, a few years ago. But what she suffered on that fateful day was highly unusual and a merging of several events.
