This week I took some time to do some end of summer cleaning and yard work. There is never an end of these two tasks so no better time than the present! I always find black widows in this one particular spot that I was working on, so I was careful and on the look out for any cottony looking webs. I didn’t find any webs but I did find a nice sized hole behind my mum and I wondered what could possible be living in it? I didn’t see anything and I knew it wasn’t a spider hole, so I moved along and didn’t give it any other thought. Several stacks of weeds later, and I was done. Then when I went back to the flower bed to pick up my gloves and pruning shears, I found a nice little snake slithering along the house straight for the mum! He was small, so I didn’t get really freaked out, no screams or anything like that. My heart did start to beat a little faster though as I watched him travel along the edge of the planter. Guess where he went? Straight for the mum.
He wrapped himself all around the branches and just kind of hung out, like it was his home or something. Then he went into the hole, curled himself up and there he stayed. I was very, VERY happy I came across him when I was done with the weeding and not while I had my arms and face all around the mum pulling all those pesky grass blades that had made their way in with the plant. I am sure that would have been a pretty good scare had the snake been home sooner!
I am not good at snake identification, I do know what kind of snake this is though:
But unless it’s a pet, I always think the snakes we find in the yard – all two of them – are copperheads. And since copperheads are poisonous, we get rid of the snakes we find because what if they might be copperheads? (I hear, apparently, you aren’t supposed to kill copperheads.)
This little guy was the third snake we have found in our yard and he is bigger than the other two ever were. I almost thought those others were worms rather than snakes, that’s how small they were. Either way, I did some research cause this one is big enough to kind of have some identifying marks, and I think he may just be a baby rat snake. It is still to be determined if we want a snake living and growing in our backyard right next to the deck…
Rejoice for the Day 