Fourth (R.I.P.) and Fifth ("Matthew! A Snake!") Snakes of the Season

Sigh. It's been kind of a slow snake season until this week. And then, boom! They're just slithering all over the place! Well, no, that might be a smidge of hyperbole, but two in one week has been more than enough.

Snake #1: On Wednesday, my carpool kiddies came home with Matthew while their mother (Becky) went to a school meeting. She came to pick them up after about an hour, and while she and I stood chatting (sob! I miss working with her!), her daughter pried up one of the large stones that we use as part of a "walkway" to the cul-de-sac. And lo and behold, there was a little worm snake underneath. We all gathered around to umm...admire (?) him and then the stone was dropped rather quickly back on top of him. Which did not bode well for little worm snake. I lifted the stone back up to check on survival rate, and well, let's just say he looked kind of flattened, and well, hungover.

When I checked again on little worm snake the next day, he was, of course, smooshed and dead. Real dead. So, fully believing in the circle of life, I flung his lifeless little body into the bushes and by the next morning he was gone, having been a tasty dinner for some local wildlife.

Snake #2: Today, I took Matthew into the horse pasture beside our house to look for monarch butterfly caterpillars. These are the ones that live/grow up/chrysalize on milkweed which is quite plentiful in this field. I've sent this kind of caterpillar into their prior classrooms several times before. If you have little munchkins, this is a really fun (and EASY - no maintenance) and amazing transformation to witness. But I digress. We had already found a couple of caterpillars of different sizes (they range from about 1/8 of an inch to about three inches), but we kept walking the field looking for more milkweed. All of a sudden, I heard a rustle down at my feet. Now let me tell you, Julie the Paranoid had made sure that she and her son were properly attired (according to the Pesticide Dude Rulebook of Snake Bite Avoidance) in jeans and boots. However, after The Copperhead Debacle of July, I tend to be a bit jumpy. AGAIN (because I live in hope), I looked at my feet, hoping at best for a black snake. Alas, it was not to be: I just saw tan-ish and red-ish stripey/spotty snake back about two feet away. "Matthew! It's a copperhead!", and I think he and I both shed our own skins as we jumped back a few feet. But then, like the rubbernecker who can't look away from the gruesome car accident, I had to examine it a bit more closely. And then I'm all aren't copperheads tan and brown? this one looks more tan and red! hey, maybe it's not a copperhead, but a corn snake! Because let me tell you, this snake was doing it's best to make itself hidden from us, and there was no triangular, copper-colored head to be seen. Frankly, we had a lot of difficulty locating the head at all because it was hidden in the dense grass. I even - and yes, I have since washed my hands - picked up a hunk of dried out horse doody to throw at it and get it to move, but alas, it burrowed even further into the grass. But at last I was able to get a glimpse of the head. And well, it was slim and narrow because...this was a corn snake after all! Whew! My bro-in-law (hi David!) has a corn snake for a pet (his snake, named Pablo, can also be called The Snake Who Refused to Die, but that's a story for another day), but I have never seen one in the wild.

My mom warned me earlier in the summer that people are going to stop reading my blog if I don't lay off the snakiness. Oh blog audience, how she underestimates you! You do love my tales of reptilian adventures, right?