"songbird" wrote in message
Farm1 wrote:

Today I decided that I needed to face the fear so went back and had a
look
in the bin. No snake thankfully. I decided that I'd use my compost
screw
to aerate the bin and was prepared to drop all and run if I pulled up a
snake. All went well - just lots of wriggling red compost worms.

*whew!* but now you are on-edge all the time out
there. are they climbers?

Not that I've heard but the other common snake we get here (tiger snake)
supposedly is. According to a herpitologist I spoke to when I had one of
those in my wood shed. they like to climb into bushes at about chest height
and arealso commonly about after dark. His advice was not to go wandering
about outsside at night.

will you be rousting about looking for it?

No. These snakes are elapids and thus highly dangerous and best givne a
very wide berth. I think the only elapid the US has is the coral snake and
although I know the US does have rattler hunts, I don't think that coral
snake hunts are common :-)).


But otherwise, on the plus side in the garden, I finally have tomatoes
just
about ripe, there are zucchini on the bushes and it looks like we might
get
an excellent crop of apples and pears.

oh good! i'm glad to hear you have a fruit
crop this year.

We've had a major strawberr glut. That was a delight but we're now waiting
or a second round to crop.


I just hope that is the last sodding snake I see for the season. Ever
again
would be good, but that is way too much to hope for.

i will hope you won't see any more of those kind
of snakes soon unless you are moving them along to
another home. protective gear, yep, i'd be wearing
it too no matter how much i sweated.

There really is no option aobut moving them along. They just live here and
that's that. the worst thing was having Jack Russells. They regulalry went
fo rthe snakes and ende dup costing us a fortuen in anti-venine. We lost an
ealry one we had but then the next two cost us a bomb. One was over $5K
alone - about $2K of that was snake bites. Add to that the organophosphate
poisoning the little sods got and it's clear how much we liked those little
brutes since we shelled out so much to keep them alive. Sadly we now just
have a Cavalier King Charles and he's dumb and boring, but stays away from
snakes.