snake charming

Today I planned to do, and did, some work out in the yard, the grooming stuff like cutting off the water sprouts on the crepe myrtles, digging up pecan tree sprouts, pruning off the spent rose branches and in general tidying up around the yard. The place I started at is a small bed by the driveway that has a rose bush, an althea, a ginkgo tree, and a lantana. I had tossed some larkspur seeds in there last fall too.

I had pruned back the althea some on the other side and I noticed some grass had made it's way in under the low branches and the lantana and the leaf mold and I started to reach in and...stopped.

Hmmmm. Maybe I'll poke around in the there with the long handled nippers first.

So I poked around in there three, four, five times and a big snake head popped up and started moving towards the rose bush. I could tell right away it was a big rat snake which are harmless unless you happen to be a small rodent, which I'm not, and I jumped up and ran in to get my camera. By the time I got back it had made it's way up into the rose bush and was on the trunk of the tree. And then I took pictures as it climbed the tree.

This is my third encounter with a snake this spring, well, in the last month. Tomorrow it will be 4 weeks since my snake bite. (And, in case you are wondering, it is still slightly swollen and is still a little discolored.)

The first, of course, was my copperhead bite. The second was about a week ago. Next to the outside wall of the garage, we have small stacks of bricks and other such stuff. It's also where the outside faucet is so we are in and around there all the time. I leaned over and picked up the watering can and a snake moved off. It looked just like the copperhead that bit me, same coloring, same size. I couldn't ever see it's pupil well enough to see if it was slitted or not (had no trouble with that with the big rat snake).

So did I leave it alone after it moved to perceived safety between some bricks? What do you think? I went and got the shovel and then proceeded to probe at it to get it out in the open where I could decide if it was a copperhead or a small rat snake. Did I have on shoes? What do you think? Anyway, the only shoe I can get on my bit foot is an old stretched out birkenstock, not much protection there.

It never did strike at the shovel but it's pattern looked right and it had a very definite triangular shaped head and the way it curled up in that S pattern was so familiar. So I chopped it's head off and apologized to it all the way back to the 13 Acre Field where I tossed it.