Copperhead Snakes in the Backyard - Yikes

Four times in the last we have found a Lowland Copperhead snake in the backyard. This not the same as the American snake of the same name. This one is in a completely different family, the Elapidae. Three of those four sighting may have been the same snake as they were in the same area near my pond, and at the stairs that lead to the pond. In fact on Saturday I came very close to sitting on one that was sunning itself on the stairs. The other sighting was about 30 metres closer to the house. No doubt someone will want to know if it is venomous. The answer is yes. It can, and has, killed humans. However it is generally fairly shy. The real danger is in stepping on one or, as I nearly did, sitting on one.

Although I've often had Copperheads in the yard I don't actually have any good photos of them. Twice I had the camera on me this week but I only managed the poor quality shot you see further down. It was taken with the 100mm macro lens as that's what happened to be on the camera at the time. I would much prefer to take snake shots with the 400mm :-) Hopefully I'll get some better shots in the coming days. I do have a couple of videos I've taken, including this one of the snake hunting frogs around the pond. I embedded this video in another post months ago but it only had three views, so, chances are, most of you have not seen it.

_{( All photos, videos, and text on this blog are by @mostly.nature )}

The shot below is is the only photo I got. The head is on the left side. It slowly slid off into the bushes. I waited a couple of metres away to see if it would come back out. It eventually poked it's head out for just a moment and I got another really bad shot. I have pasted the head shot into the same image.

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