Originally Posted by motor_oil_madman
Just a baby. It was shiny black maybe a foot long at most.
A baby/juvenile cottonmouth is tan/brown in color with a series of darker bands across their back. The tail starts out yellow and then turns greenish as the snake matures to an adult, and finally becomes black when it's fully mature. If your little snake was just a foot long and shiny black, it wasn't a cottonmouth.
Originally Posted by motor_oil_madman
Lol. I'm not getting bit trying to take a picture.
If you ran over it with a mower and it didn't move when you hit it with a weedwacker, then how could it possibly bite you?
You can also just look at the shape of the head to determine if a snake is venomous. Venomous snakes have triangle shaped heads, and non-venomous snakes have oval shaped heads. Vipers have a pit and a nostril on their face just forward of the eye, a non-viper has just a nostril with no pit (hence the nickname "pit viper"). A cottonmouth is a pit viper.