Found a fresh snake skin in my shed a few days ago. Really hoping that it's from the resident rat snake.

Thanks for the heads up. As I convert my old lawn into a convention site for critters, I cannot help but wonder what lies beneath the mulch.

A couple of years ago, in January, we had several inches of snow on the ground. The sun was out. My wife and I were eating lunch at the table and looked out the window to see a hawk swoop down beside the chain link fence in our front yard, and fly off with a 4' black snake! I guess the sun was warm enough, and there was a bare spot along the base of the fence, so the snake was catching some rays. My wife was quite impressed with the hawk!

George

coonx, You know, I saw a fresh skin on the ground last week, not in the same area where Casper saw the snake, but maybe 100' away. It spooked me a little, but we had days in December, January and in February that were in the 70s and 80s so I knew it was possible snakes were coming out looking for a meal on a warm winter day----I just didn't want to believe they actually were. I hope your skin was from your resident rat snake. In the past, the earliest I have encountered a snake outdoors was either on March 1st or 2nd, likely in 2007 or 2008, and it was a pygmy rattler about 2" from my hand. I instinctively did a backwards somersault to get away from it since I already was crouched down low to the ground. I'm glad there were no eyewitnesses to that event.

Bon, That's one of those things I try not to think about too long and too hard. Because I have so much trouble with timber rattlers coming out of the adjacent woodland, I am very cautious when handling mulch and compost year-round, always wearing heavy leather work gloves and using a rake to move mulch and compost around before I put my hands near it. Sometimes I'll stir up a skink or a glass lizard (which looks very much like a snake) which will startle me, but I rarely find a snake in the mulch. They more often are slithering through a raised bed looking for a meal, often preferring the dense shade beneath potato plants once the plants are a foot or two tall.

Some years I mostly have trouble with copperheads, and with an occasional diamondback rattler. The last two or three or maybe four years, the persistent problem has been with timber rattlers. I keep reading they are rare. Ha, they may be rare in some places, but I encounter them almost weekly and sometimes several days a week in summer. The place I most often encounter them is right at my garden gate. They come out of our neighbors' woodland to our south, slither across maybe 20 yards of pasture, slide under the barbed wire fence, cross our driveway and meet up with me at the gate. It happens over and over and over again to the point that I start dreading that walk to the garden gate as I'm likely to encounter a venomous snake there. And, it isn't the same snake over and over because we shoot every venomous snake that we see around our house. They can room our 10 or 11 acres of woodland all they want and we leave them alone, but when they come to the yard or garden, it is too risky to ignore them.

I feel really bad for this soldier that lost his leg. I cannot even imagine what he must be going through, but he is lucky to be alive. And, of course, it wasn't just luck---his hiking companions acted quickly to give him the best chance to survive.

There are times I've been so close to snakes, including timber rattlers, that I don't know why I haven't been bitten, but I'm grateful I've been so fortunate to avoid that fate. I want to remember what happened to this gentleman so that I am more careful than ever, particularly in the garden. We always joke that it is a jungle out there in summer (and it is) but I am aware that snakes can be hard to spot in a jungle of vegetation. We also talk about how odd it is that I always see the timber rattlers just outside the garden gate or trying to slither through the fence, but rarely actually see them inside the garden. (One did climb up into one of my Luna hardy hibiscus plants last spring just a few feet inside the garden gate.) Do I think that we see and shoot them all before they get into the garden. No, I do not. What I think is likely is just they are easier to spot in the gravel driveway but once they are in the garden, I just don't see them, which is scary in and of itself.

I have wondered if snakes have "roads" that they navigate along, perhaps from the scent laid down by the earlier ones, because I have also noticed that they seem to follow each other along paths. We don't have nearly as many as you do. We see (and kill) 2 or 3 copperheads a summer, but only one rattler in 30 years (it was a timber rattler almost 5 ft long.) And there isn't enough water on our place for cottonmouths, although we have seen them in our neighbor's pond.

Does seeing a copperhead in a shed count?

Ok so I have changed my mind about moving to the country again..............................................

Dorothy, I believe they do. We have a place on our road where so many copperheads routinely cross the road that we've nicknamed that spot Copperhead Crossing. With the timber rattlers, I often see them emerge from the neighbor's pasture in the same general area time after time. Maybe not always within a few inches of the spot where I last saw a snake emerge from the pasture, but within a foot or two of it.

There's probably not enough water at our place any more for water moccasins, but that's because we filled in the lily pond. They never would have gone away if we'd kept it. I miss it, but I don't miss the screaming of the frogs when the snakes catch them, and I don't miss looking down into the pond and seeing a big nasty cottonmouth glaring back at me.

Connx, Of course it counts. As does seeing a snake in the garage. We have some friends up the road who have copperheads come into their garage every year. One day the lady of the home saw three in one day and chopped them up with her hoe.

I like to clean up and reorganize my potting shed on one of the coldest days of the year and, even then, I remain alert and watch for snakes. I want it to be so cold that if a snake happens to be overwintering in there, it will be very slow-moving and I'll see it long before it sees me. I haven't seen one in there yet, but I've had snakeskins....and we know how those snakeskins made it into the shed. They didn't just fly in on their own.

Before we built our garage, we stored the mower and other equipment in a storage shed that was closer to the woods than it should have been, and there were snakes in there so often that I wouldn't step foot in that shed. When Tim would go out to mow, he'd just take a gun with him so he could shoot whatever rattlesnake was in the shed. It had a dirt floor and the snakes could blend in with that dirt floor really well. Getting the mower out of the shed was just too scary for me but I'd mow if Tim would get the mower out for me.