Gardening Heroics
on 06/11/2009 at 11:21 AM
Waytago Wardmom ... that thing looks scary to me.
I’d a never thought you have snakes where you are. But you said you were near a nature preserve, I think.
Hey wait a minute. A crock in the bathtub? Huh? Where were you? And how’d it get in there?The snake looks like a common black rat snake to my untrained eyes. They are pretty common in the Midwest. Not poisonous, but the bite can smart a bit. They do a good job of keeping the mice and other critters down. I have a rather large one that lives under the front porch. He likes to come out and sun himself from time to time. If you are not ready to see his 3+ feet of length it can get the old ticker racing until you realize what it is.
I shall never live this down - NEVER. No, no rattle - Many years spent in OK & TX - we are both well aware to look for that first. Stephen - we had kind of come to that conclusion ourselves but just wanted someone with some snake knowledge to give us the ok. Since he did not seem aggressive and was not injured - we had to let him go.
If he is a rat snake - more power to him, it is one of the reasons I keep cats - don’t have to worry about those nasty critters in my home.
The croc in the bathtub - well my Dad was a Doctor and had a great sense of humor - so when his patients went on vacation - they used to ask him - want me to bring you something back from where I’m going? He always said something completely ridiculous. And so the alligator went to a biology lab, the baby croc took a less than 24 hour dive in our tub (before becoming a resident at the local zoo), the fighting cock had a brief stay until he drove the pony crazy - and the chimp never made onto the grounds. I don’t know who was crazier my Dad for asking or the patients for actually bringing the animals back.
The nature preserve, has a creek - so I guess that things like this should be a given. They cleaned out a tad last fall along the fence lines - but it is a mess back there (a lot of dead and dying trees - we’ve had a bad winter) so I should have expected something like this - we have had a buck in the garden (picture did not turn out) and of course last year harassed mightily by a fat ground hog so hopefully this is our Wild Kingdom adventure for the year.
The good news is that my youngest daughter saw the picture and has said she will never come home again. Let’s see how long that lasts!
I won’t claim to be a herpetologist, but that picture looks a lot like the king snakes we get around here (US Gulf Coast). King snakes are good guys, they eat mice, rats, and other snakes, aren’t poisonous and are pretty easygoing. But yeah, they do get big and can freak you out if you’re not expecting them. There are about a zillion varieties and I dunno enough about snakes to say from a picture.
06/11/2009 at 12:25 PM
