Dorothy, You are such a better country woman than I ever will be. I cannot bear to even look at a snake much less stand close enough to chop one with a hoe. We have lots of black snakes and the first few years we tried to tolerate them because they control rodents. Once they started wrapped themselves around our little keats and chicks and squeezing them to death, we stopped tolerating them. We see them a lot more than we see actual chicken snakes. Among the venomous snakes, I see Timber Rattlers (commonly called velvet-tail rattlers here) more than I see anything else, although I see a lot of copperheads too. We've always had lots of non-venomous water snakes but the last three years we've had cottonmouths in the lily pond. I am just about done with the lily pond for that reason and think more and more of filling it in. I'd miss the water lilies but I wouldn't miss the cottonmouths. Helen, Between our house and the Red River to our west there is one old farm/ranch. It is used mostly as a weekend place now by one of the adult children who grew up there. He has so many copperheads on his property at night that he says when he sits on his front porch at night and shines a flashlight into the yard, there will be this huge amount of snake eyes looking back at him. He just sits there on the porch and shoots them, but no matter how many he kills, more of them just keep coming. Larry, He surely did kept his wonderful sense of humor, didn't he. Dawn

Jo, any time you catch and release a critter, you can pretty well plan on it coming back. It's fine to be a humanitarian about it, just as long as you know that's what they're going to do. I think that some of them can beat you back to the property, and dumping them where they'll be a problem for someone else is not a very good plan either. I hate to have to shoot things, but there are times when it's really the only thing to do. Dawn, I know what you mean abut every day being an adventure. When I went out to check the tomatoes earlier, I found a small turtle that was feasting on a small fruit I had tossed aside. Not a terrapin. An actual turtle. I just left him alone. One of the more exciting things that happened is that I have a big bank of windows in front of my computer and around to the side, so I get a really good view of most of the pasture. One day during the heavy snow, in the middle of the afternoon, I saw something swoop down and grab a small prey and then fly up to the top of one of the sheds. I figured it was a hawk. Naturally, I got out the big binocs, because I wanted a closer look. Imagine my amazement when he turned his head and looked at me and I realized it was not a hawk at all. It was a huge owl, out hunting in mid-day! As far as those black snakes, we tried the artificial eggs, and I tried jamming the holes full of bird netting, and we shot a bunch of them. I was horrified to learn that they can kill a full-grown hen. My neighbor who raises chickens as a business is the one who told me what the problem was, after I had him come and look at a dead bird. What seemed to finally cut the population way down was when I put out that Snake Stopper powder. I've only done it once, and probably need to renew it pretty soon, but we haven't found a snake in the chickenhouse since then. Not that they can't come in and steal eggs and leave again. I just haven't seen any of them this summer. I scattered the powder when I figured snake season was about to begin, as soon as it really warmed up, and it seems to be working.. Pat

Mike, We deliberately moved to the country because we wanted to be surrounded by wildlife. It was a sort of kum-ba-ya decision because we didn't really understand what living so close to so much wildlife management land and open river bottom land would entail. We just wanted to live in the country and enjoy all of it---the trees, the water, the wildflowers, the birds, the butterflies, etc. Maybe we underestimated how much wildlife can be dangerous, so in that sense, I think we got a lot more than we bargained for. So, our wildlife policy, especially with regards to snakes, evolved over time as we became more aware of how aggressive some wild creatures can be. We had to learn to toughen up and kill some things before they kill us. The local ranchers and farmers were great about teaching that to us. They all carry guns in the back seat of their pickups and shoot what needs to be shot. When they were shooting snakes in our early years here, they'd throw the dead snake in the bed of the pick-up and bring it to me to show me while I was working in the garden. They'd tell me what it was, describe and explain its markings, etc., and impress upon me over and over again "You have to kill it, because if you don't, it may kill you." In a way it was like have a bunch of brothers, uncles, dads or grandfathers looking out for you and teaching you, and I appreciated all of them, even if they thought I was a lunatic-hippie-freak because I gardened organically. (grin) Every one of them seemed to have a story to tell about a friend or family member who'd been bitten by a venomous snake and had been very ill, or lost a limb, or had medical problems related to that bite that lastedor years and years. After a while, when they'd bring a dead snake, instead of telling me what it was, they'd ask me to tell them what it was. I was a fast learner, but during all that I also learned to watch out for atypical coloring and markings. Being right in the middle of the state, just a little bit west of I-35, we sometimes see snakes that are a lot more common to our east, and sometimes see snakes that are a lot more common to our west. I guess we have twice the fun with twice the number of snakes, so we try to be twice as careful. In a perfect world, people and wildlife peacefully coexist. Well, in the real world, they don' always. We have some friends who woke up with a skunk in their house one night. Another friend woke up and found a rattlesnake curled up in her bedroom floor. For people here, these kinds of wildlife encounters are fairly common and you just learn to deal with it. As for your kids, one of the people bitten by a snake near us was a young teenaged girl who'd just stepped out of a swimming pool.....and that's exactly why you never can be too careful. I am willing to bet the last thing on her mind as she got out of the pool was that she was going to step on a venomous snake. I have had to work hard to make myself expect to see snakes. I watch my feet as I walk across the yard and, since it is such a habit, even when we're in a big city at something like a movie theater parking lot or a mall parking lot, I catch myself watching my feet as I walk across the parking lot. It isn't that I really expect to see a snake there in the city, but just that watching my feet so I don't step on a snake is a strongly-engrained habit now. My worst snake encounters mostly have been with timber rattlers, but once I had a pygmy rattler 2-3" from my hand and another time both the dogs and I were far too close to a western diamondback rattler. I cut up a copperhead once with the mower, and never even saw the snake prior to rolling right over it with the mower. I probably had some gray hair when we moved here as I was 39 years old, but I can guarantee you that there's a lot more gray now (only Miss Clairol knows how gray my hair is now, and she isn't going to rat me out) and the snakes are responsible for a lot of that gray hair. You know, there was a news story a few months ago about a young man stationed at Ft. Sill who got bitten by a venomous snake while hiking with another military man. His friend got him down the mountain quickly and got him medical care, but that soldier still lost his leg. I think about his story often, just to remind myself of the cost of one simple snake bite. It helps me remember to be careful. We lived here 15 years before I saw a snake in our garage, but now that garage has been added to the list of places where I have to be extra careful. You either get smart and learn to be extra careful and to deal with each threat that arises, or you get bitten. I'm doing my best to avoid being bitten. Oh, and one more thing, even a bite from a non-venomous snake can be painful and can get infected and cause problems, so I am still careful even when I am around a non-venomous snake. Dawn

Johnny, The rat snakes are horrible this year. Tim dragged one out of the chicken coop, where it was feasting on eggs (but not on chicks since the chicks were free-ranging with their mama) on Tuesday, and then shot it. That one was about 5' long. Then, on Thursday, Chris dragged a 6' long one out of the chicken coop. It was quite strong and fought him hard and got away before he could shoot it. The rooster was quite hysterical about the one on Thursday and was up on the front porch having a hysterical fit by the front door to alert us that something was in the coop. Usually when he is that upset it is a skunk, so in a odd sense, we were relieved that it was only a snake upsetting him. I hate rat snakes almost more than I hate all the venomous snakes. The rat snakes will wrap themselves around even half-grown chicks or keats and squeeze them to death before they eat them. We lost 4 keats to one rat snake in one day a few years back. I don't know if we have a flood-related population issue with the rat snakes but there's far too many of them in our chicken coops, driveway and yard this year, and they seem hungry. Maybe the floods washed away too many of the rodents and the snakes are getting a little hungry. Most of the rain missed us, y'all, and I fear I will have to drag out the hose today and water the plants I have growing in containers. It has been nice to not have to do that much this year. We ended up getting several little showers coming through yesterday, but the total rainfall was just a smidgen over a half-inch. Since our rain came in little waves during the daytime hours yesterday, our temperature, which was 73 degrees in the morning, stayed cool most of the day, not rising above 76 until mid-afternoon. Of course, to make up for lost time, it quickly shot up to 90 degrees once the rain clouds moved on and the sun came out. Still, for early July a high of 90 isn't bad. I'm glad the heavy rains missed us. We have had perpetual cell phone and internet issues in our area ever since the May flooding. It seemed like the issues finally were clearing up (presumably all the cell towers were finally repaired after the flood damage) in June when the big second round of flooding hit and we were back at square one with poor cell service and even worse internet service. There's been a little improvement this week, but not much. It is hard to get on the internet and stay there for more than a couple of minutes unless you're on it at the unpopular morning hours between about 4 am and 7 am. I'll be glad when they get everything back to normal, and we're hoping for no more flooding. Dawn