I would like to have a pond but am afraid of the cotton mouth snakes. I have a friend who was working on her water lilies and one huge snake chased her all the way to her house. Her husband finally shot it. And I found a huge fat one curled up in my overturned kayak. I put Pvc posts in ground hanging my kayak off the ground. When we turned it over it slid to the bottom of kayak and we just dropped it and ran. We have canals that drain storm water to Lake Washington in melbourne. I'm sure that's where it came from. I am not scared of snakes, love my black racer, but the cotton mouth is another story.

I'm quite thankful to not have such snakes around here.

Hi MonaN,

We have the Cottonmouth Moccasin's here too ... very aggressive and very poisonous! Snakes of any type scare me and although I've seen moccasin's swimming in the water, luckily I've never had one chase me, that is so scary! A few years ago we were seeing a few coral snakes too which are quite poisonous and a neighbor had a couple of pygmy rattlers on their property once ... Yikes, I do not like snakes!

We just moved a couple of months ago and our new house has a small pond in the atrium at the front of the house. The atrium is enclosed but I found snake skin in the mulch around the pond ... haven't seen a snake yet. We're going to remove the rubber mulch around the pond at some point and replace it with something else .... when that time comes I think I'll supervise from a distance and let my husband remove it.