Do black snakes bite in the mountains in west virginia around wet marshes?

Most snakes will bite if pressed. There are differences, though, in how they bite and how much they bite. The two main black sakes you're going to run into in WVa are Black Rat Snakes and Black Racers. Timber Rattlesnakes come in a dark morph, but I'm not sure I'd expect to see them in marshy areas. They're more rocky, dry upland sorts of snakes. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd look for the other snakes in marshy areas either, but you never know, I guess. Anyway, the appearance difference is that Black Rats have a nice, "Ivory"-colored belly and often show traces of the light-grey juvenile patterning well into adult, while Black Racers have a white chin and a black belly and are a nice glossy black all the way down. Behaviorally Racers are touchy, cranky and aggressive, while Rat snakes are docile and relaxed as a rule. This means that if you corner and pick up a racer, it will bite you, bite you again and then keep on biting you. Racers can be hard to keep because they may be so touchy that they keep striking at you and bang their noses on the glass or screen of the cage. Black Rats will often give you a bite when you pick them up, to express their irritation, but it's a simple bite-and-back, almost like a slap. Black Rats don't hang on and chew like Garter Snakes and Water snakes like to. Once it's bitten you once, (and Rat Snake bites are really not a big deal - I've had much worse results from blackberry brambles picking berries. Those things will tear you up.), a Black Rat usually calms right down and becomes almost friendly. They make great pets, too; very easy to keep, very easy to handle, and since they feed on small mammals (and most houses are infested with mice), if you have a few live traps, you have a free source of food.