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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Wild Kingdom, backyard edition: Episode 2

We have a creek running behind our house. It's not the best creek in the world, but good enough to go down and check out every once in a while. There are some down sides to having the creek there, like an enormous mosquito population. Poor Hannah currently looks like she has a pox of some sort, because the mosquitoes are vicious, even when the kids are swimming.

The other downside is that there are snakes. We hadn't seen any in the almost year we've been here, but the neighbors all have stories. Particularly warning that there are cottonmouths in that creek. So we've been on the lookout, but up till now, haven't seen any. The other night however, we finally saw our first snake here. It was in our backyard, but was tiny. About 6 inches long. We figured it was a baby, but a baby what? A cottonmouth that we should probably kill, or some harmless snake that eats things we want it to?

We captured it in a big plastic tub we had outside, and I came in the house and got on google. The snake deserved a fair trial.

The prisoner as he awaits the verdict:









After much googling, and going back and forth between the yard and the computer to be sure, we had an ID. I found the following picture on a site, that definitely looked remarkably like the one we had:



Was he a baby cottonmouth that we needed to execute to keep from becoming big and someday biting someone in our family? The answer is no.

Introducing the surprisingly small adult brown snake:



He was quickly cleared of all charges and released from jail, although not before pooping all over the hubby's hand in gratitude.

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