Saw one of these last year.
Not sure who moved the fastest.
Adder.
Posted on 01/03/2013 6:36:29 PM PST by BenLurkin
With pleasure, ‘Face.
Saw one of these last year.
Not sure who moved the fastest.
Adder.
You’re up very late.
You haven’t given up sleeping, have you?
Hi Bob,
no, not given up sleeping.
It was late, now it is early....:)
That is so true. First time I saw one some years back my neighbor told me it was a copperhead and that I should kill it. I didn't think something looked quite right for it to be a copperhead (although we do have them here so it could have been a possibility) so I grabbed a stick and pinned its head so I could pick it up. No fangs in mouth, not a copperhead.
We knew this one was here before we ever saw it. Found its shed in the barn, and figured it was about 3 foot long. You see in the picture that it's about the length of that 36" door.. Lots of mice to keep it happy (and some left over for the furry fourfooted rodent control posse..)
This one had just shed, and still had some of the old coat on it's head. If there's one hanging around, I would assume that there are more, but they keep out of sight for the most part - and probably further back on the 80 acres away from humans. What we do have up close to the house, out in the rose beds, in the rock garden, beside the barn-- in otherwords, all over the place.. are your basic garter snake..
Now, if something would just find our chipmunk population top its liking... ;-)
;]
People here go out of their way to shoot, club, shovel and run over all snakes.
Outside of my house, the only snakes I see anymore are smashed on the roads.
A couple of years ago the neighbor found the huge rat girl sho lived in our root cellar sunning herself in the lane and cut off her head.
We’re up to our ass in mice, now.
He threw her body in the dry stream bed and I only found out she was dead when I went to get the mail.
She was incredible and had lived here for decades.
At least 8 feet long and as big around as my upper arm.
I wept.
It was -so- uneessecary.
She’d never hurt anyone but rodents.
Several years before that, he weed-whacked the knot of garter snakes who liked to hang in the branches of my willow trees.
Hopped right over the fence and murdered them all...and then couldn’t wait to tell me about the great favor he’d done me.
*sigh*
If your neighbor continues to go all Biblical on snakes, one of these days he’s going to start walking with a limp.
You’ve hit the psychological nail on the head, I’m afraid.
[although, sometimes, I suspect it’s a bit Freudian]
;]
Sounds like the neighbor from hell... Around here we have a lot of dairy farms and the farmers tend to leave the snakes alone because of the rodent situation.
I have never seen garter snakes hanging out in a tree, but we do have a rather large one that climbs the barn wall (vintage 1880's fieldstone/morter about 18 inches thick..) and uses the rocks as a ledge to sun himself.
The only snakes that get attention are the copperheads. Have never found any on the property, so thus far I have not had to deal with them.
A developing problem here is that a lot of the old farms are being turned into developments of McMansions populated by cityfolk and they're skert of anything that lives... But they won't neuter their cats, so they take the offspring down the road to where there are still farms and toss them. So along with the garter snakes, corn snakes, red tailed hawks, somekindofnoisyowl (only hear him at night, haven't been able to light him up to ID..) that sounds like a Great Horned, and the occasional Snowy Owl (had one swoop down on one of the outdoor cats while we were watching out the back door.. don't know why it decided to call off the attack, it sure looked big enough to have carried the cat off..) (the cat is now indoors ;-) we have semi-feral cats which do rodent control but also provide entertainment for the pack of coyotes that cycles through about every two-three weeks..
The willow is nearby and in a very marshy part of the yard and during the summer heat, they'd drape themselves festively over the lower branches to escape the unbearable heat.
They weren't bothering anybody but one day he was weed-whacking the property line before we have the solid wood fence and spied them.
He “meant well”, for what that's worth.
We have all that stuff too and eagles.
A couple years ago one of them spiraled right down at my Portuguese Podengo Medio while I wasn't but a short distance from her.
It didn't give a flip that I and several other large dogs were right there..it wanted to eat her.
I lunged for her and that scared her so bad that she flattened out on the ground just as the thing swooped over us both, brushing my head with its wings.
I grabbed her up and ran for the door with the other dogs following.
The infernal chicken hawks have just about wiped out all the small mammals locally and now I see them perched along the highway on the powerlines starving, hoping for some roadkill.
“Protecting” the red tails sure worked out real well for them.
[some fruit loop Democrat “cat lady” who lived in the city near here 'never saw any’ and talked Glendenning into believing they were ‘endangered’...yeah, right]
I often wonder what she'd think if she saw them picking off her precious stray cats in the spring when their chicks hatch.
We have a lot of strange and ignorant people here.
I’m a dog lover, too :-) I love this picture!!!!!!!!
Haven't seen any willow (most of the trees are maple, some oak, some Hemlock) but have a pond probably a good 1/8 mile or more back into the property. Thing's about 30-40 feet in diameter and was used for watering livestock when this was an operating dairy farm - which it hasn't been for a number of years now. You sort of have to weed-whack your way back into it now because of all the opportunistic brush that has grown up around it. (An old aerial photo from 1976 or so shows that this entire piece of property was bare of trees except for the Hemlocks near the house and a big oak back by the pond - now trees have grown up everywhere and thorn bushes, probably wild rose of some sort grow in the remaining spots..)
The first time we worked our way back to it after we moved in (we saw it on the satellite view) we noticed that there were goldfish in it. Regular generic carp are native and I would have expected them as maybe a possibility since the pond has a small rivlet feeding it, but goldfish - not exactly. (OK, so they are fancy carp - but they're not native!) However, this past summer we had quite a number of sightings of a Blue Heron flying over coming from the direction of the pond. Last fall when the grandkids were visiting we trekked back to the pond to check on the goldfish and we provided the kids with some stale bread to feed them. Didn't see a single goldfish.. The heron probably was stopping at his private restaurant each evening for a fishfest, and all we managed to get from our inspection tour were a bunch of ticks that we spent the rest of the evening picking off.. (I keep saying that 'next year' I'll clean up the path back to the pond - but so far next year hasn't arrived!)
Very interesting color! And good luck moving a snake from somewhere it’s comfortable!
All pit vipers, including copperheads, have distinctly triangular heads, which is the first give-away as to what one should be contemplating: Fight or flight.
Stupidity should hurt. Sadly, it seems to have no limits.
There is a colony of feral cats in the arroyo not too far to the west of here, and one of the neighbors takes feed to them. They seem to be one of the main food sources for a couple of local coyotes, though stray dogs on this property have been seen to become fodder for the mom coyote.
The feral kittens don’t last to long unless they are wise to the teachings of the adults in the colony.
He-Did-It is probably related to I-Don’t-Know, Not-Me, and I-Haven’t-Seen-It.
The Stig is deep in his molt, now, and yesterday, I found him huddled in a corner of his cage. It always pains me to see him this way.
:o[
“My pillow moved! :(”
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