Snakes and the Homestead

An inevitable part of living in the country – snakes. We have, so far, encountered a water snake, a copperhead, a king snake, and a rat snake.

The King Snake was our most recent sighting. Last week Marco ran across this guy in the yard. King Snakes are fantastic. They eat other (many times poisonous) snakes and are generally non-aggressive and harmless to people. He has bands around his body all the way down, which is how I knew he was a King. He measured around 4 feet long in this picture.

Below is Herbie. This picture is from a few months ago. We love Herbie, because he has (so far) left the eggs alone, but likes to take up residence in the workshop and go after the mice. Win-win! They can occasionally go after small chicks (and so can mice), so we raise all of our feather babies in the garage until they are 5-6 weeks old.

This picture was taken because we’d never seen him so close to the coop, but he passed right on by and didn’t bother the ladies.

We have, unfortunately, also had to deal with a copperhead. While our family didn’t see it, our dog, Rocky, had a nasty bite from one a few years ago, right after we moved in. We rushed him to the vet, who gave him some medicine for his blood. Apparently, copperheads are not immediately dangerous to dogs in most cases, but over time their venom can cause problems with their blood if they are not immediately treated. Happy to say Rocky is happy and well a few years later.

Picture of Rocky on a normal day, so you can see the difference.

When we moved into our home I was pretty scared of snakes. Knowing that there were good ones and bad ones, I needed to know how to tell the difference. While I’m not on Facebook any longer, they have some great snake ID groups and there are several people who will help with IDs. My main takeaways were that most snakes are not dangerous, so when in doubt, stay away and leave it alone.

Here is a link to one of the Facebook groups I was a member of.

Copperheads are definitely dangerous, along with cottonmouths and a few others, such as the timber rattler (all based on my state). Copperheads are gorgeous and are almost pink-colored, with hershey kiss brown spots all the way down their back.

If you click on the NC ID page you will see a copperhead in the header image. I used to have a really good picture of one from a hike I was on, but I can’t find it today! I’ll add it if I see it.

I will end with this cute little guy chillin’ at a creek in KY (our old house).