In the area that encompasses the Ozark Mountains and foothills (Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma) there is a subspecies or race of copperhead that has a lot of pink in its coloring - a very pretty snake. A friend of mine that works with reptiles at the zoo takes it upon herself to rescue as many as she can and when you visit she always has them in buckets or boxes or pillowcases in transit to someplace. Sometimes to be released, sometimes to other people who will house them awhile and then release them, some people to breed them I guess. I never ask. From all I've been told the bite is very painful but not life threatening as long as you end up in front of a doctor before too long. On one of my recent trips she picked me up in her pickup (the only vehicle allowed in OK) and we headed off to her place way out in the country by Lake Oolagah (I love those Native American names). On the way we had to stop and pick up her preteen daughter from school. We screamed through the school parking lot, shuffled some debris around behind the seat so that the kid would fit along with my luggage. It wasn't until we got out into the countryside that my friend mentioned we would have to stop so that she could release some snakes into the wild. I thought this would be great and that I could take some photos, since I had my camera with me. We stopped on an old country road in the shade of some trees and found a spot with a small stream - a perfect spot for a release, a rarely travelled road, shelter, food and water, a reptiles dream home. I had visions of a snake or two, maybe one poisonous in the mix. I was wrong. They were all copperheads, and there was a bunch of them. I don't remember how many exactly but it was more than 7. I also assumed they were in containers in the bed of the truck - WRONG! they were in tupperware containers on the floor of the kingcab, right at her daughters feet!!! It all came off as reckless to me but in all her life (and her children's) no one has ever been bitten - her horses have left plenty of scars on everyone and have proven far more dangerous than the reptiles. I've worked with reptiles in my past though I was never certified to work with venomous (and never wanted to be either). Snakes don't bother me like they do other people. When my vole population gets out of hand I've been known to haul home anything legless with scales to help with the problem - including copperheads. My tune may change if a person or pet gets bit, but until then they are all welcome in my yard. A problem with catch traps - glue traps, snap traps or bird netting left on the ground is that unless you check it every day the rotting animal stuck in the trap can really stink up your back yard.

Emma, We always have had snakes here in plentiful amounts, but then our back property line sits only about a quarter-mile from the Red River, so it would be shocking if we didn't have oodles of snakes. I can link the rise and fall of our snake population more to the river itself than to the weather. After a big rainfall year like 2007 when there was widespread flooding, we hardly saw any snakes at all whatsoever for the next year.(it was terrific!) Then,after almost 13" of rain in one day and widespread flash flooding in April 2009, we didn't see many snakes at all until thef following spring. I suspect the flooding had made a big dent in their population in both 2007 and 2009. 2010 seemed normal. In 2011, we saw relatively few. Perhaps the heat had a negative impact on the survival of their young. In every summer, as it gets hotter and drier and the ponds and creeks dry up, the snakes we do have will move to any available body of water, including a bird bath or small water lily pond, but I don't think we have more....I just think they venture closer to us humans out of necessity. I always think that we have too many snakes, but then the one neighbor to our W/NW whose home sits between us and the Red River has vastly more snakes than we do. I am glad his property is there as a buffer between our place and the river. He can sit on his front porch and shoot snakes night after night after night and still more and more keep coming. Bre, With repeated efforts, the kids will learn. Country kids learn at an early age that there are some things they need to be really careful about. Sometimes, though I think we forget to look at things from their perspective. When our son was dating a young woman who had a little girl who was then just a toddler, she and I built a Peter Rabbit potager garden. We spend oodles of time playing in the dirt, reading the simplest versions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and planting similar crops in our Peter Rabbit Garden. She was so excited, and so was I, but for different reasons. We had a darling little picket fence, but we had completely different attitudes towards the fence and the Peter Rabbit Garden. I wanted to close the gate to keep the real cottontail rabbits out of the Peter Rabbit Garden, but she wanted to leave the gate open at night so that Peter Rabbit and his friends could come into the garden and eat! Clearly, we had different ideas about the purpose of the garden, and this experience taught me to remember to look at things from a 2 or 3 year-old child's perspective and not just my own. Be sure your hoe is sharpened so that it will chop a snake in half. A dull hoe won't do the job and you do not want to have an angry snake that feels threatened coming at you. We see brown snakes all the time here. They just turn and run. I believe they are as startled by seeing us as we are by seeing them. Oops, I forgot to link the website earlier that has photos of snakes of Oklahoma....I'll link it now. Occasionally we have lost a cat to snakebite but not a dog, and my little cat, Spots, who is sitting here on the couch beside me as I type this has been bitten twice. She rarely goes outside any more....though it is hard to guess if her love of sleeping on the sofa in the air-conditioned house is related to past bad experiences with snakes or not. One cat almost died, but then survived. He was almost comatose for almost two weeks from a copperhead biite to his groin area, and still bears the scar. He is the only cat we've had that had the copper rash in the area where he was bitten. One of our neighbors who was bitten by a copperhead had a similar rash near the site of her bite. One of our neighbors had an old little dog named Rascal when we moved here. He might not have been a full-blooded rat terrier, but his appearance was somewhat like a rat terrier. That was the bravest little dog I've ever seen. He completely hated snakes. When he saw one, he'd catch it, shake it a certain way to break its neck, and then would skin it and eat it. He was a completely amazing little dog. He lived to a pretty old age and then just disappeared. We always assumed a coyote or something got him. The cougar encounters were quite unsettling at the time. I always thought it would be cool to see one "in the wild" until I actually sow one. When we were in our pickup truck going someplace and saw two walk across the road in front of us, that was cool. Having one roar at me? Not cool. Having one in the yard twice in one year, and right by my garden. Not cool. I have to be honest and say that for a couple of months after those two incidents, I only went to my garden to harvest and then immediately came back inside. Being out there made my skin crawl. For a couple of years after that, every time I walked down to the spot where I saw the second one, which was about 12' from me when I first noticed it, my body had an involuntary reaction.....heart pounding, fear, that fight-or-flight feeling. I was worried that my brain would never "get over" that experience and always would feel creeped out, but eventually I got to where I could be in that area without having the feeling of fear. Your location sort of guarantees you'll see lots of wildlife and most of it will be a wonderful experience. I love seeing all the wildlife as long as I am in a location where I don't feel like they can get to me. Just today we had a turtle laying eggs under the plum tree (she lays her eggs there every year) and a wild turkey walking up and down the driveway and all around my garden. The turkey has been here for weeks. It is a male looking for a female and apparently can't find one, so it does the mating dance for my chickens who stand in their fenced chicken room and stare at it like it is an idiot, why their roosters just all puffed up and upset and stomp around trying to scare off the turkey. Usually one of our more bold cats will start walking towards the turkey and it then will vanish into the woods. I enjoy having that sort of wildlife around, but don't like seeing the predators too much. Nothing flusters my son, who is a professional firefighter or my husband, who is a cop, but the cougar incidents came close. Of course, they were inside the house either watching TV or on their computers each time and missed the really exciting part. Both of them have shot their share of snakes and skunks. The gators are rare, but not unheard of. Sometimes they are found in or very near the Red River. Sometimes they have made themselves at home in a stock tank. It always makes the news specifically because it is so rare. The year before we bought our land, which was 1997, a gator was found in a stock tank on property about a half mile from ours. On the day I drove up from Fort Worth so I could be here on the day that the electric co-op guys were installing our poles and electric lines and our water co-op was putting in our water line, the guys working here warned me that two different people----one in town in Marietta and one right here on our road---had been bitten by snakes that day. With one of them, the snake wouldn't let go of the person, so the medics had to cut the body off the snake and take the person to the ER with the snake still attached to the person's body. That was a creepy image. Those utility workers wanted to be sure I understood just how many snakes we have around here, so that I would be careful. I appreciated so much that they were so concerned. (I also was horrified when I thought about how we had walked all over that property with the real estate guy when we were considering buying it....we walked through Johnson grass in the bar ditch that was head high, we walked all over the woods, the fields, up and down the creeks, etc. We went places I never go now because there's always so many snakes there! Live and learn..... We have bats every summer. I love seeing them. They are one thing you do need to teach your kids not to touch, for obvious reasons. They usually come out around twilight and, at least at our place, they always flock to the outdoor security light looking for bugs. I love to sit out in the lawn chairs and watch them. Discovering the bat activity here was a really neat surprise. Feral hogs are very dangerous and can kill a person. A couple of ranchers west of Marietta had some very close calls with them and narrow escapes from them a couple of years ago. I usually hear them before I see them, and I always go inside when I see them. Well, once I did go into the woods looking for them (what was I thinking?) and found them in the creek....they often travel the creeks, which often have only very shallow water in them....and then I hightailed it right back to the house. The first time a feral hog ran out into the road in front of me, it was so big that I was sure I was seeing a hippo. I see them more often when we are out at wildfires in remote locations than when we are at home on our own property. I don't like seeing them. They tend to be really aggressive. I see coyotes a lot, and have had our dogs get in fights with them, which scares me. My dogs are pet mutts, not livestock guardian dogs and pet dogs often get the worst end of the deal when they tangle with coyotes. There is nothing worse than hearing a fight to the death between a coyote and dog and thinking that it might be your dog. It wasn't....but the sound of it all was so terrifying that a neighbor came running from about 100 yards away to check on me because he thought the coyote fight was on our property....it might have been, but it was west of the house in a dense woodland....and he and I both knew all our dogs were home and accounted for. You cannot be a gardener and avoid wildlife because it will be out there with you and your children. Most of the time, you'll love seeing it. Even the animals I personally find frightening are still something that it is thrilling to see....after you get over the fear. Most coyotes turn and run. I've had more trouble with deer that want to pick a fight with me than with coyotes. About 90% of the time, the coyotes turn and run. We had trouble with a couple of coyotes for a few months that looked like cross-breeds between coyotes and domestic canines. A neighbor called them coyote hybrids and warned me that they had enough domestic dog in them that they didn't fear humans like normal coyotes do, and I sure did learn that for myself. I love living here but I've told Tim many times that if I every encounter a bear near my garden, I'm packing up and moving back to Texas. I wouldn't actually do it, but at that point it would seem like a great idea. We rarely have wildlife in our garden any more because we kept raising the fence higher and higher to keep the wildlife out. Now both the front garden and the back garden have fences 8' tall, and both have two gates....because you need a way out if a wild thing comes in one gate. The worst sound I've ever heard is the rattle of a rattlesnake. I always freeze in my tracks and try to determine which direction the rattle is coming from so I can go in the opposite direction. The closest I've ever had a venomous snake to me was a pygmy rattler about two inches from my hand. When I saw it, I instantly and instinctively did a backwards somersault (I was crouching low to the ground before I saw it) to get away from it....and I was glad no one was around to see that odd movement. It was in late February or early March when the snakes usually are not out and about. I have seen snakes out in every month except January, though we usually see them only from about March or April through November. Some breeds of snakes are very aggressive, but others are a lot more passive and would rather flee than stay there and fight you. I try to give them a chance to flee and get away. All my neighbors will come over and shoot a snake for me, and sometimes more than one will come and I will think to myself "they are having too much fun with this.....:". I appreciate them though, and think we have the absolute best neighbors in the world. It is one of the reasons I love living here. On the page linked below, click on the photo gallery to see the various snakes featured there. There are 46 kinds of snakes in OK, but only 7 of them are venomous. At our house, brush piles and compost piles are prone to have snakes lying around them in the summer months, so I pile on the compostable materials, but I never turn the pile and I only remove compost from it in winter. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Snakes of Oklahoma

Caroline, I had lots of exposure to snakes growing up...my part of Fort Worth had plentiful copperheads, and we always did a lot of hiking and camping. Also, I had lots of relatives who lived in the country. Still, nothing prepared me for the vast quantity of snakes we'd have here. However, we have the Red River on 3 sides of us and lots of wild territory there, so we'll always have lots of snakes....even 30 or 40 years from now. Lisa, I am such a big baby when it comes to some forms of wildlife. I am sure that I would be considered a total failure as a "country woman" by most of the people who grew up here and have been surrounded by wildlife all their lives. I don't fish, I don't hunt, and venomous snakes make me fairly hysterical. I refuse to let locals come onto our property to shoot doves, wild pigs, deer or rabbits (they're welcome to shoot all the skunks and snakes they want). I don't like to eat (or cook) venison, squirrel, rabbits or anything else that has been hanging around the yard, so if someone gives us some game meat, DH has to cook it himself if he wants to eat it. Furthermore, I don't own any camo clothing and I don't plan our social life around the opening of deer season. In spite of all my failures and shortcomings, our wonderful friends and neighbors accept me and love me anyway. I think they just figure you can take the woman out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the woman! LOL In fact, if they hear a cougar roar, or a raucous fight that clearly involves coyotes and dogs and the noise is coming from our property, they come running, shotguns and rifles in hand, to save this fraidy-cat city slicker from the evil whatever. (And I am so grateful and appreciative.) One of them told me that I was "salvageable" because at least I could garden and cook. LOL I also keep them pretty entertained with the occasional "guinea parade". This happens when the guineas roam up the road, and I go after them to chase them back into the yard. Of course, the cats and the dogs follow me, so if you are driving down the road at the right (or wrong) time, you'll see the guineas, followed my me--waving a rake and a straw hat to chase them out of the road--followed by the cats, who keep getting under my feet, and several dogs happily running along, barking and wagging. IT STOPS TRAFFIC. Well, mostly they stop because we fill up the whole roadway and they can't get around us. It also stops traffic because my neighbors laugh until they cry. Life here is never dull, and I (unwittingly) do my part to keep everyone entertained. Dawn

Wow OP, you have WAY more guts than me. I would've hightailed it out of there so fast you could see skid marks lol!! Worthy, your link brought back a scary memory for me too on the same issue. Remember the "Flood of the Century" that hit Winnipeg in '97? I was living in a basement apartment at the time that sucker was coming. I kept my cool having our city taken over by military, I kept my cool helping DH (BF at the time) sandbagging all their houses to 10' heights, I even kept my cool when pictures of the flood hitting Grand Forks, ND and literally obliterating it hit the news - knowing this was coming our way. I TOTALLY lost my cool, it was quite simply my breaking point, when they issued an "advisory" that water levels were too high and rats were coming out of the sewers rather than drown. Up until that point, my home was my "getaway" from all the madness. It was "safe" and would not be underwater if the floodway caved. I am sooooooooo terrified of rats!!! My parents wanted me to come home (Sask.), but I actually moved to DH's place - which was ON the river's edge lol - rather than deal with rats biting my butt or getting in my apartment. DH graciously duct-taped my toilet lid down and covered all drains so they couldn't get in. But with an unusable toilet, I preferred the risk of living at DH's rather than RATS. *shudder* What's really funny? DH only recently told me my risk of butt biting was just as big at his place lol. I HATE RATS (and snakes, and bugs, and pretty much anything reptillian). I'll stick with cats & dogs thank you very much lol.