I was walking the trail and there it was, in the brown leaves, only about 4ft. long. Jake got a stick and threw it over the fence into vacant property where it came from. I was just thinking it is hard to see a snake in the leaves. I haven't been feeling good last few days good thing I wasn't walking my usual fast pace.
Thanks Tony. Jake was behind me on golf cart with dogs on lease, thank goodness, some days I just take the walkie talkie. Today Jake said he didn't want me walking by myself.
A couple of years ago I was trimming around the steps to my house with hand shears, and underneath the grass was a copperhead. I was about 1" from it. I almost touched it. It slithered off. After I cleaned myself off, I went to another part of the yard to work, and then returned to that spot, where I almost touched it again. The bugger had come back.
You could get geese. The old timers in North Carolina told me that geese will not tolerate snakes, and they will drive them from your property. Of course, then you have geese to deal with.
Last time I saw one was on Mt. Palomar in southern California not far from the path to the observatory. Plenty of signage about staying on the plank path but it sure wasn't clear how much protection walking in the center of a 3 foot wide path could be. It wasn't elevated or anything.
I was gonna comment on how the loss of snakes might cause the mouse population to go unchecked, when I read about the diet of geese: Rodents are not off-limits for geese. Although adults do not actively hunt mice and rats, they will eat them if they come across them. Geese are omnivores and will eat small animals such as mice or other meat if they are available. Given the choice of rattlers or geese, I'm not sure which I'd choose.
I would definitely prefer geese to rattlers, or any other venomous snakes, and do not even have to think about this. Geese are also terrific guard animals, and will make as much noise as a dog when someone comes onto your property, and will go right out and stop people from getting out of their car. Geese are also affectionate with people that they know and like. Years ago, we found a poor goose out in a creek that was pretty frozen over. The kids and I followed her up and down the creek until I could finally catch her, and we had her for many years after that. This goose decided that she really liked my ex-husband, and she would follow him around the yard. When he was crawling around underneath our old pickup truck, fixing something, the goose would literally crawl under the truck and lie down beside him and keep him company while he was under there. After being bitten by a copperhead, I have NO liking for snakes of any kind, venomous or not; but especially venomous ones. The other ones can stay out of my way and catch all the rats and mice they want to.
As wife and I were walking thru grassy parking lot, leaving a rodeo in Romona, CA, I noticed something slithering thru the grass in from of us. It was some type of snake, but definitely not a simple garter snake. We turned and went a different way. I remember reading about a guy that was looking at plants in Walmart. Somehow/someway, a baby rattle snake had gotten into a plant and was laying in the dirt. The guy didn't see it and was checking out the plant. The baby rattler done it's "rattle", but it was very low sounding, due to being a baby. The snake bit him and he had to go to ER to be treated. From what I've read, baby rattlers are more poisonous than adult rattlers.
They're not really more poisonous. It's just that an adult snake can control how much venom is injects when it bites, so because a human is a threat and not not a prey item, the adult snake injects enough to make you back off, but it does not waste the entirety of its venom. The babies have yet to develop that level of control, so every time they strike they dump everything they've got.
Years ago, our dogs were barking, I went out and it was a pigmy rattler, never saw one of those, haven't seen one since.
I just looked. Fortunately, we don't get those in Virginia. Animalia.bio classifies them as a pursuit predator, as well as an ambush predator. ps: Animalia.bio is a pretty cool critter website. Here's part of the page for the pygmy rattlesnake. You can click on each Characteristic Box to get a complete definition of that trait. The pic is tough to read. Here are just the Characteristic Boxes for the pygmy rattlesnake: