Snake alert

Snakes are not amongst my favourite creatures. Perhaps my lack of love for them comes from my father saying, every time we would be walking anywhere, “watch out for snakes!”. It was sound advice, of course. The other constant refrain from my parents during childhood was “watch where you put your feet”. So I do. On my daily walks I am always checking out the terrain in front of me. Mostly these days I do that to avoid tripping on fallen branches or bark from gum trees or putting my foot in a hole and twisting an ankle or worse. However, this morning I pulled up with a start. There, a metre away, was a copperhead snake. If it had been alive that would have been uncomfortably close. I was relieved when I realised that it was dead. Copperheads are venomous.
 
The Australian Museum tells us that “Copperheads tend to be secretive and prefer to avoid encounters with humans. If cornered a copperhead will hiss loudly, flatten its body and thrash or flick about, but usually without biting. Further provocation will cause the snake to lash out and bite. The venom is powerfully neurotoxic, haemolytic and cytotoxic, and a bite from an adult of any of the species may be potentially fatal without medical assistance.” If, unlike me, you are really interested in copperheads you can read more here.
 
The last copperhead I saw was on our own front verandah at our previous home. I had come home from the supermarket with bags of groceries to find a snake curled up just near my front door. We had a couple of guys painting the house at the time so I went and asked them how good they were with snakes. Not good at all, I discovered. They refused to even come and look at it. I then went to our wonderful neighbour, Arthur, who grabbed an old hessian bag and a spade and came to take care of it. By the time he and I arrived back the snake had gone. The painters saw it slithering off towards Arthur’s place. It was never seen again. Now I hasten to add, for those who get the horrors from reading this, that we then lived on the edge of bushland.
 
There has been the occasional sighting of snakes on the Estate where we live now but, thankfully, not on our front verandah. Blue-tongue lizards are the more frequent visitors there. I'm not particularly fond of them either!