[Magdalen] Taking care of our neighbors in the yard

[Jay Weigel]

I'm like Juli in having little patience with people who are automatically
horrified by snakes without considering what kind they are, and whose
immediate reaction is to kill them. While I'm not crazy about rattlers,
copperheads, and pythons, I still admire their unique beauty. I find the
black snakes on our property quite elegant in a quiet way, plus I
appreciate their rodent and insect eating proclivities. I've had numerous
encounters with them and always treat them with respect. I love the little
garter snakes in the garden, too...they're cute.

Two snake stories. One concerns my friend Kirk, who had a farm in the
mountains of east Tennessee. His original house had a separate cook house
out back which was no longer in use for cooking and he used to store
assorted equipment such as his riding mower and his 4-wheel ATV. It was
also home to a 7-foot king snake. He told every new visitor about the snake
and said that it was to be treated with respect and greeted when one
entered the building, and that if you didn't like snakes or were afraid of
them, stay out of the building. I always did as instructed and was lucky
enough to to see it twice, once coiled around a rafter and once gliding
along the edge of the wall. Magnificent creature. Second story--when my
Betsy was 9, she and a bunch of her soccer team were kicking around the
field before practice and one of the boys found a small, recently deceased
garter snake. She was the only girl on the team who would pick it up, which
engendered much admiration from the boys. She says she wouldn't do it now,
though. ;->


On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 10:44 AM James Oppenheimer-Crawford <
oppenheimerjw at gmail.com> wrote:

> I must content myself with the occasional turtle...
>
>
> Good for you ! ! !
>
> James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
> *“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
> except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy
>
> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 1:15 PM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I went out on the lower porch about half an hour ago to take in the sun
> and
> > the breeze, and while I was there I noticed a black snake that seemed to
> be
> > caught in netting which S/O had  stapled around the corner post years ago
> > to assist the autumn clematis in its journey upward. Poor snake seemed to
> > be pretty thoroughly entangled, and knowing that these guys are not
> > venomous, I went and got S/O to have him look and see if there was
> anything
> > we could do. His first judgment was that the snake had expired, but when
> I
> > told him I'd seen it move, he got gloves, scissors, and a sawed-off broom
> > handle and proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes carefully snipping
> > netting and vine away from our scaly friend, which had got itself MOST
> > thoroughly entangled. I assisted by holding vines this way and that, and
> > the snake seemed to understand what we were doing and actually positioned
> > itself as much as it was able to so that S/O could reach netting that was
> > in between coils of its body. At last we managed to get it free, even
> > though we couldn't get all of the netting completely off it, and it
> crawled
> > off down the porch. I looked for it later and it was gone. S/O thinks it
> > may have gone down to the woodpile to rest and try to scratch the
> remaining
> > netting off. I'm just happy we found it and were able to free it. I am
> fond
> > of black snakes and I would hate for it to have died tangled in that
> > netting.
> >
>