Shudder, no oak trees in my lawn, thank goodness!

George, That's a great article. Thanks for linking it. Our lawn is full of oak trees, and the woodland that surrounds us is acres and acres of oak trees. We do have tons of copperheads out sometimes in the evenings, and they often travel up and down our driveway as if it is some sort of snake superhighway. We are ultra careful about being outdoors after dark. The folks next door have had two people bitten in their yard (filled with oak trees) by copperheads, though not in maybe the last 8 or 10 years or so.

We've never had as many copperheads as the guy mentioned in the article, but a neighbor who lives west of us and whose property sits directly between us and the Red River can sit out on his porch in the evening and shoot copperhead after copperhead. He just holds up a flashlight and shines it out into the yard and sees dozens of snake eyes staring back at him. It really takes two people to shoot them----one to hold the flashlight and one to fire the weapon. He really has to do it in order to keep his yard safe for everyone, but especially to keep it safe for the grandkids.

I'm always happy to see locust season end. The incessant droning used to sound like, you know, one of the pleasant sounds of summer to me....like the croaking of the frogs or the call of the chuckwalla's widow or the cooing of the mourning doves, but over the years it has come to annoy me. Now that I know how strongly the locust droning is linked to all the copperhead activity in our yard, I like it even less. Maybe I just need earplugs.

Amy, I doubt that means you're home-free, but hopefully it means you'll have fewer locusts and therefore fewer reasons for copperheads to be on the prowl. One of the places I most often encounter copperheads is under the pecan tree that sits west of my garden gate and underneath hackberries that sit on the edge of the woods on the north side of my garden. Those copperheads like to lurk on edges where woodland meets grassland. Perhaps the hunting is best there along the edges.

I don't mind the little regular type of copperheads so much. They really are not aggressive and would rather flee or hide, but the big broad-banded ones are quite a bit more aggressive and I hate seeing those.

Dawn