A childhood belief about plants

For some reason - and I have no idea why - when I was very young (probably about 3-4 years old) I thought that the sticks that fell during a rainstorm that were still wet would bite you if you touched them. If they were dry, everything was fine, but if they were wet, they'd bite you. Further, this applied only to small sticks, not to branches or limbs, but sticks of the specific length of maybe 2-7 inches. Anything larger or smaller was deemed, for some reason, harmless. So I would get my yellow rainslicker on, take a plastic cup, and go around cautiously collecting these biting sticks, ultimately putting them either in the trash where they couldn't hurt anyone or in the garage to dry them out enough that they were once again safe for public use. Then, for some reason, I stopped thinking about it altogether, without any consideration as to whether or not what I'd been thinking had been correct or not.