B Man...It's ok...nothing to get so worked up over. I now understand that your original comment was sarcasm and that I had misunderstood that. I did not apologize for anything other than not catching the sarcasm. As many misleading things as I've heard people claim about snakes, I just figured you actually believed they wouldn't bite in December. I've certainly heard crazier claims than that!
None of my statements have been misleading. Although I kept snakes in cages, I have plenty of field experience with them as well. I was trained by one of the foremost experts in the field of herpetology and on the snakes of Trans-Pecos Texas, so I know damn well what I'm talking about and haven't offered any googled half-thruths here.
I will agree that animals in the wild will take advantage of conditions on a given day. However, what you fail to understand is that digestion is a long process for snakes. In warm temperatures, they digest a meal more quickly than at cooler temperatures. Even in ideal conditions, they take days or weeks between feedings as it takes them that long to digest a meal. During the winter, they instinctively know better than to feed when temperatures will not remain stable long enough for them to have digested the meal. If caught with a meal in the gut when temperatures drop, the animal would potentially have a rotting rather than digesting meal in its digestive tract. They need warmth in order to carry out digestion and, during the winter, they spend the majority of their time in a hibernaculum in which the temp is too low for this. Therefore, they do not eat during the winter.
As for having hijacked the OP's thread, I think the intention of the thread was to discuss rattlesnakes being active in South Texas during the winter and that is exactly what this discussion is about. I'm sorry you got your feelings hurt by my misunderstanding of your sarcastic comment, but all that I have stated here is fact. I've spent half a century in the south and southwest of Texas, in some of the most remote and snake infested parts of the state. I've studied them both in captivity and in the field and I do know what I'm talking about. The bottom line is that they do actively move during winter months and they certainly can deliver a bite at any time of the year. We have 5 species of them out here in the west Texas desert where I live. I saw a Diamondback dead on the road, just last week, prior to a cold front moving in. Two weeks before that, I killed a Mojave rattler on a friend's front porch after she walked up on it in the dark and it scared the hell out of her. A couple years ago, I damn near stepped on one as I was walking through some tall grass in December, on a cold windy day, while helping a friend track a deer. If you are in snake country, you are far less likely to encounter a rattlesnake in the winter, but there are no guarantees that you won't come across one, even in cool weather.