ooooodogie! Thats a whopper. We just moved to lake front property and many black water snakes and water mossicons have been spotted. I have cats and bassets, so hopefully that will keep our snakes at bay (no pun intended). I have a question-what's "bigfoot" doing with that hoe???:) CJ

Lol...he hooked the snake with it and flung the poor critter.
I LOVE the zoom feature on my camera :)

Is that a water mossicon?

No, it's not a moccasin...this is a cottonmouth moccassin.
His name is Ten Dogs, and he lives in my yard.

I don't know what kind of snake that is in the pic above, but I know for certain that it is non poisonous.

jac'
That's a good'un!!!!

As for the water 'mossacin' - a friend blew 3 holes in the bottom of his new canoe when one dropped from a tree into the end of it. They are foul tempered rascals!!

note to self: Marilyn's lilies are guarded by water moccasins.

;)

We've encountered a Rat snake and a King snake already this year.

Fortunately, the Copperheads which lived by the front porch when we bought our home 3 years ago seem to have relocated.

We have had so much rain that I am actually surprised that I haven't seen any snakes....

Well, I suppose with snakes that size, you don't have any rodent problems. I would rather have the snake than the rats and mice.

Ohh ewww...not me..sorry everyone, I know that there are good snakes, but I am not a snake person at all. They skkeer the bejeebies out of me...I can handle any other critter on Gods green earth..just not a snake.
marilyn, I know this will probably seem like a dumb question, but that snake is poisonous...why do you keep him around? My dumb luck he would bite me....
Does anyone know what that top snake is??? and jacs you DH is very brave!!!
Dena

Looks like a rat snake. Really a shame you did that.

Every since I learned that if you see rat snakes you have unseen rats and mice; and if you kill rat snakes venenmous snakes will move in to take their place, I have been content to leave the rat snakes alone.

We all have a reflex action, a natural inborn protective mechanism, to jump back when we see a snake, but then reason takes over with the realization that some snakes are doing a good job for us.

Interestingly it's against the law in India to kill cobras, one of the most venomous of all snakes, because they control rats.

There are several other small and medium size harmless snakes we might see in the garden. Familiarize yourself with snakes and remove the fear.

The first thing I do when I see a snake is look for the very wide jaws of copperheads, rattle snakes and water moccasins, the three venonmous snakes. If it has the more narrow head it's okay.

My friend Barbara had a phobia, an unreasonable fear, of spiders. Her doctor suggested she wear some beautiful jewelry in the form of a spider. Barbara loves jewelry and began to collect spider pins and rings. That did it. She overcame her panicky fear of spiders. So perhaps if one has an unreasonable fear of snakes a jeweled snake pin would be a nice gift to yourself.

Do you suppose that is the secret reason that some men wear snake skin belts and scorpion belt buckles???

Happy gardening! :-)

Familiarize yourself with snakes and remove the fear. HA! HA! HA!

Familiarize is possible; remove the fear is impossible.

I have a terrible case of Snakephobia-Fear of snakes (Ophidiophobia) I try hard not to be afraid, but I don't always succeed. If I wasn't so afraid of snakes my life would be a lot easier. Be easy on us that are afraid of snakes.

ltcollins, I should have said "familiarize yourself with snakes and be able to identify which ones are not a danger to you."

I truly understand that people have various phobias that aren't easily controlled and for them even looking at pictures of what they are afraid of would be more than they could undertake.

If phobias become a problem it seems there are various deprogramming methods to help one deal with them and even totally overcome them. I have a friend who studies NLP and reports great success in using it to deprogram phobias; and it works very quickly. NLP stands for Neural Linguistic Programming.

Blessings and happy gardening!

I worked with a guy who said that he was only afraid of 4 kinds of snakes, big ones, little ones, live ones, and dead ones! He also said that there was no such thing as a harmless snake. Said if they was harmless, they'd be called chickens!
Jim

"Looks like a rat snake. Really a shame you did that."

Did what? Fling him out of the workroom?
We don't kill anything but scorpions around here!

Jacquelyn yes, you told us that you flung it out in the beginning. Guess a lot of people naturally assumed you killed it; especially since snakes don't usually hang around long enough to get their picture taken once they are discovered.

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"Posted by jacquelyn8b 8b (My Page) on Sun, Jun 3, 07 at 22:46

Lol...he hooked the snake with it and flung the poor critter.

I LOVE the zoom feature on my camera :)"

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Hahahahaha!

roselee - I agree with you that we should become familiar with the difference between venomous and non-venomous snakes. My husband doesn't like snakes either. I have saved two snakes - one poisonous and the other not. The poisonous one was a small copperhead who had himself curled up in a piece of brick. I put a container over him with a lid and released him and the brick out in the woods. No harm done. The other was a small rat snake who was sitting between the concrete flooring and bottom of the drywall in our garage. My husband saw a snake and he said he was going to kill it. I captured it in a container and released it in a nearby wooded area. I will not let him kill a snake. I saw on Animal Planet where one of the wildlife experts said that if we didn't have snakes, we would be knee or hip deep in rats and mice. Now there is something to consider - put up with snakes or be knee deep in rodents. . . hmmmm . . . which one should I pick . . . I think I'll keep the snakes.

I just found one outside in a light. Probably looking for my birds. Anyone know what it is?
Jac, what kind of snake is the one you found?

Texas Rat Snake?

Marilyn is your snake named 10 dogs for a reason? Have you been feeding that sucker your neighbor's little dogs?
My 5yr old dd wanted a pink snake for x-mas last year. Her friend's older brother had a garter snake and she had such a fun time carrying it around the house all day. The dh decided that it'd be a great thing to get for her, yeah right. So I told him sure but he would be responsible for taking care of it. Good thing I like snakes 'cause you know how long that lasted. Now I have an albino corn snake named Sara added to my list of things that I keep alive in this house.