Snakes - The price of living in the sticks.
by Jack Aubrey | Published on September 18th, 2008, 9:19 am | Life
Saturday night the moon was full, or nearly full, and wanting to play astronomer with my 2” refractor, I decided to recon the moon and pick a clear shot with low light pollution. It was very humid and I thought it was a good night for snakes so right before I stepped off the porch I looked down. Sure enough, there was, what I thought to be, a copperhead stretched out across the top step! Keep in mind I find black snakes in the yard every year even stepping on one two years ago. I also find shed skins in my lawn mower building. I usually don’t mess with them as I figure they keep the mice population down when they mow the hay field across the street. Anyway, being the first copperhead I’ve seen since I was a kid, I went screaming like a little girl, into the house to get the wife. Being the animal lover she is, she wanted to make sure it wasn’t a corn snake. So after watching it crawl into one of the decorative bushes in front of our porch, we concluded, after internet consultations, that it was indeed a copperhead. I knew messing with him could get us bitten so I was really wishing he would crawl away never to be seen again. Being concerned the snake may lay claim to a feeding territory just outside my door and having the kids run across him during play, I decided to kill the poor thing. It was beautifully marked and looked somewhat elegant. My wife went and retrieved the shovel but I was too scared to get near it so I shot it with the kids BB gun. It didn’t do the job so the wife laid into it with the shovel but she couldn’t get the head off so I finished the job. I put the body out in the open thinking a scavenger could have a meal and the snake wouldn’t have died in vain, but after starting to smell I was motivated to bury it. Anyway, it was exciting for us and I was compelled to trim the growth away from the house and I will not walk in the yard now with out compulsively looking down.
