{"id":20908,"date":"2020-10-04T15:24:35","date_gmt":"2020-10-04T19:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/?p=20908"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:37","slug":"the-imposter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/the-imposter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Imposter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Thursday I noticed a piece of heavy black plastic hanging down from under the siding along the back of our house. Just 6 or 7 inches long and maybe 2-3 inches at the widest, like it fell or was pushed out from under the siding. “What the heck,” I said to myself, and pushed the plastic back up under the siding. Maybe it was mice. I’d better toss some bait in the crawl space this week.<\/p>\n

On Saturday I was walking along with a dog on a leash and this brown head pops out from under the siding and peers at me: Oval, 1\u00bc” long, color of milk chocolate, soul-less black eyes, flicking a forked tongue.<\/p>\n

“What the hay fork is this?” I yelled. We stood there staring at one another for a few moments, me trying to decide if I should grab the thing and yank it out of there. Not knowing what it is, that might end badly. Before I could decide, it ducked back up under the siding.<\/p>\n

I slept fitfully last night, envisioning going out at 4:30 to turn on the coffee maker, in the dark, and stepping on a snake. I mean, if mice can get into the house around the plumbing through the floor (and they do occasionally) so could a snake. And I don’t have any snake poison to deal with that possibility.<\/p>\n

As I finished up with the mid-day dog play session and Sarah Sue Tinyshep and I were heading for the back door, a snake was crawling down from that spot in the back of the house. About 4 feet long. It flumped onto the ground and it had the familiar two-tone pattern of a copperhead. I hurriedly took Sarah out of the way and confined her. I grabbed the poop scraper I use in the kennels – which is not as long as I’d like and not nearly sturdy as something like a shovel, but it was all I had on hand. By this time it was trying to crawl back up the foundation.<\/p>\n

\"snake<\/a>
Not my snake, not my wall, but you get the idea.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It amazes me how well snakes can grab onto stone, brick, stucco, with their belly plates and climb a vertical surface.<\/p>\n

I nailed it just behind the head with my pooper scraper and pushed as hard as I dared without buckling the light weight handle.<\/p>\n

A mighty battle ensued.<\/p>\n

As it struggled, it was opening it’s mouth and I could clearly see the lack of fangs.<\/p>\n

Chocolate colored head not copper, and oval not triangular. No fangs.<\/p>\n

This is some sort of imposter snake. Maybe a corn snake, although they are more reddish than this. A yellow bellied king snake looks similar to a copperhead too.<\/p>\n

It was still struggling, wrapping itself around my scraper blade trying to … well, I don’t know what it was trying to do. But I decided to use the scraper as a trebuchet and launched it about 50 feet up into the woods. Maybe it will survive. If it does, hopefully it will go hunting elsewhere. If it doesn’t — well, it should not have come slithering around my home in its copperhead pajamas, pretending to imperil me, my wife, our dogs.<\/p>\n

It was probably eating mice that were staging for an assault on our home (it IS fall, they do that as winter comes on), so I feel kinda bad about that. But … stepping on a snake in the dark. Nah, not taking that chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Thursday I noticed a piece of heavy black plastic hanging down from under the siding along the back of our house. Just 6 or 7 inches long and maybe 2-3 inches at the widest, like it fell or was pushed out from under the siding. “What the heck,” I said to myself, and pushed … Continue reading “The Imposter”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-20908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-adventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20910,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20908\/revisions\/20910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}