I've been in Florida 49 years and the only venomous snakes I've seen are the Eastern Coral Snake, at our old house where we lived for 37 years and the Water Moccasins I saw a couple of months ago in the waterway behind our current house. The home where we lived for many years was in an unincorporated semi-rural area of the county and about ten years ago there was a lot of acreage being cleared so the coral snakes and rattlers lost their habitat and slithered down into our neighborhood. A guy across the road from us in our old neighborhood once killed a 6 - 7 foot Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake in their backyard and after the Hurricanes of 2004, my next door neighbor killed a Pygmy Rattlesnake that had taken refuge behind the wood they used to board up their bay window. Once, my 83 year old backyard neighbor (who wasn't afraid of anything!) called me and told me that there was a really pretty red, black and yellow snake in her garage and I should come see it, that it was the prettiest snake she ever saw! She was going to pick it up and take it outside but I told her to stay away from it because it might be a coral snake, so she got the guy across the street to come look and indeed it was a coral snake so he killed it. A couple of weeks after that I was on my hands and knees weeding a garden bed outside my pool area and out of the corner of my eye I noticed movement on the ground and spotted a colorful snake ... it was the black nosed coral snake slithering towards the area where I was working! I jumped up and took off towards the back fence and it slithered into the mulch. Needless to say, I was done working in the yard that day and I swear I was still shaking an hour later! Coral Snakes are really scary, they are often confused with the Scarlet King Snake and the Scarlet Snake and I could never remember the little "ditty" about how to tell them apart; I'd heard some people say to remember "Red touching Yellow, Dangerous Fellow" but then I heard someone else say "Red touching Black, Jump Back Jack" ... it was very confusing trying to figure out what was what so now I always look for the nose, the deadly coral snake has a black nose while the king snakes have orange to reddish or whitish noses. All snakes scare me and I jump whenever I see one, even if it's just the garden variety that I know are good to have around. Snakes just make me very nervous! I had a greenhouse back in the 1970's and sometimes rat snakes or king snakes would get inside. We occasionally see black racers in the yard here ... one startled me last month when I was moving a plant.
Yikes, Snakes give me the creeps. I could use a ~<~*shivvery* ~<~ creepy *~ >~* emoticon here.
