Reptile time

I wish I had a picture of our last three snakes, but they caught us unaware. By the time the neighbor had killed one it was too mangled to photo, and when my husband, Gary, caught the second, it was a little too immediate a problem to photo, so you'll just have to take my word for it. The first, we saw slithering under a car headed for the house (one of the dogs, all of whom hate snakes, saw it first). We managed to semi-deter it, shoving it off into the lilies by the well cap, much to the consternation of a chipmunk who blasted out of the lilies as soon as the snake arrived. The following day, Gary found an interesting striped snake who lives in the woodpile. Still no camera and by the time he had one in hand the snake had disappeared. Then later that afternoon our next door neighbor, who is terrified of snakes, was startled in her garden by the one Gary had ushered into the lilies. She killed it, then asked Gary to take it away. Nature may be savage, ( it's a snake-eat-chipmunk world out there) but She cleans up her messes over time, so he pitched it into the back brush where it will gradually feed other things as it decomposes.

An hour later a screech from next door alerted us to the third snake. Our neighbor's daughter-in-law wouldn't let her kill this one and the pair were tracking it in anticipation of the Robson Relocation Unit arriving in answer to t he screech. The snake turned out to be big --5 feet long and as thick as a Kielbasa though as with all the indigenous snakes here on the Eastern Shore, not poisonous. We went over with gloves and a squitch. ( For those of you who remember Horton and Dr. Seuss, you'll need no explanation, for those who don't, it's a kind of extension grabber tool). I ran off to collect The Snake Whisperer, a young friend who LOVES snakes and whom snakes LOVE. But by the time I returned, Gary had the snake in gloved mitts,so we climbed back into the car and drove out to a friend's farm to release him. I only hope the snake doesn't have the homing instincts of a snapping turtle, which houses some kind of internal GPS (which is another story). Life in the country is never dull. I only wish I had pictures.