a Someone should care, maybe not you....: The Snake in the garden...... .comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Someone should care, maybe not you....

My thoughts on many things including the army, war, politics, the military corrections system, chaos, life, books, movies, and why there is no blue food. Feel free to comment on what I say. Feedback is nice.

My Photo
Name:

40+ year old former teacher, linguist, interrogator, soldier, and lastly convict. We all do stupid things every once and awhile. I am an economic conservative and a firm believer in civil rights. Starting a new life now and frankly not sure what I am going to be doing.

08 May 2009

The Snake in the garden......

Snakes. I really have no problem with snakes. I’m pretty laisez faire about them in my yard. They eat rodents. I like that. Just eh other day I saved a big one from my dog. But yesterday, well yesterday I killed one.
I went out in the morning to look at the little concrete pond in my back yard to see how the six goldfish I tossed in there were doing.




When I walked up tot the pond something splashed into the water, which is not unusual. Typically it is a frog but this time I noticed something strange in the water. There was a fairly large snake sitting on the bottom of the pool. I actually didn’t make the connection between the movement and the snake at first. It was still on the bottom and my first thought was that a snake had drowned in the pool. (possible in a swimming pool but not so much in this) I picked up my dip net and scooped it out and had a large angry snake that suddenly looked very much like a water moccasin in my net. I wasn’t certain at first but it had the wedge head, the thick body and the mottled marking s that are common to moccasins. There are also some other water snakes that look a lot like that too so I took the snake over to the edge of the woods and dropped the net and prodded the snake with a long stick. The snake reared up and struck at the stick and there I saw the flash of the famous white mouth.

Now about two years ago I lost a dog to a snake bite and I am not eager to repeat the event. Since both the dog and the cats use the concrete pond as their watering hole I picked up and long heavy chunk of fat lighter and killed the snake. I don’t mind snakes but I don’t want poisonous ones living were my animals drink.

In the evening, when I came home from work I took a picture of the dead snake. The dollar bill is so you can see its size. If you look closely at the edges of the snake you can see the ants busily at work recycling it.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I learned a while back to stop feeding stray animals - specifically cats. Cats eat rodents. So when the rodent population is low snakes aren't around. Rodent pop goes up, snakes come around. Snakes = bad.

7:10 AM  
Blogger exMI said...

My cats kill a lot of rodents too. But where I live there is a near unending supply.

8:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's lots of brown wedge-headed snakes. But why take chances?

4:35 PM  
Blogger exMI said...

That is why I goaded it into striking at me. I wanted to see the mouth.

11:09 AM  
Blogger The Zombieslayer said...

Ants and flies are cool. If it weren't for ants and flies, there would be dead bodies of animals all over the world and it wouldn't be pretty.

As for water moccasins, I'm not the resident expert at snakes, but I got attacked by one before. Not fun. They're aggressive and will bite you more than once. Plus they're poisonous. So you did what you had to do.

Granted I wouldn't go out of my way to kill one, but I would if I had to.

5:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, EXMI!
I wouldn't even have to have seen the white mouth to run from that fat, short body. I HATE water mocs. I almost stepped on one once...

Anyway, it's been a while since I stopped by your site (I just haven't been online much this last year or so). Glad to see your site is still up.

--Serena (abroad)

11:28 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home